Tag: Photography

Mobile phone camera compared to DSLR

We all carry them every day, almost every waking hour of our day we have an iPhone or an Android phone of some sort in our pockets or our bags.

Ready to hand for that notification or to take a quick photo. If you have a mobile phone from say the last 5 years or less then the camera built in to it is very good?

I was of this opinion too. I have taken hundreds of photos with my iPhone and they look just great. That is in most situations.

However, how do they compare to the output of a DSLR. OK in this test I’m using a Nikon D300 not your latest all singing all dancing mirrorless $5000 (including taxes!) camera. But I thought you would be interested to see the comparison.

The scene is an unrestored chateau here in France. The images were taken at the same time on the same day. The cloud formation confirms that… clouds are like fingerprints!

First image is the Nikon D300 unedited:

As you will see the horizontals aren’t quite horizontal, typical of a lot of my images! And very little detail in the shadows.

Now the same scene taken with an iPhone 15 Pro:

Notice how it has boosted up the shadow detail and the whole image looks much brighter, may be too bright.

I then did a small amount of editing in Apple Photos to the Nikon image and came up with this:

I’m no editing expert, I don’t pay my monthly/annual Adobe Tax for Lightroom or Photoshop, I only use Apple Photos.

The edited photo above to my eyes is a reasonable compromise as to what the scene looked like on the day. I’m still not sure it’s truly vertical/horizontal, but nothing in my world ever is even when checked with a spirit level!

I could have also edited the iPhone image, but for this ‘test’ I’ve left it unedited. I suspect most of the images we see on social media don’t get edited, may be cropped but not a major dive in to tweak everything possible!

Have you ever done a similar comparison?

The camera you carry.

The year is 2006, the place is Royal Tunbridge Wells in England.

I have gone in to town to do some shopping. It was a lovely sunny August day.

My DSLR at the time was my Canon EOS20D (8.3 Megapixels), but it was at home.

I only had my mobile phone with me. It was a Nokia 6230i it has a camera, all of 1.3 Megapixels. It was my first mobile phone with a camera. It’s tiny and easily fits in my jeans pocket. The battery lasts for days….and the phone still works in 2025!

On the way in to the car park I came across an unusual sight, lots of bricks covering the road, the area is taped off, but I managed to get past it.

I made my way up to the top floor as I know there were always spaces up there.

Before going shopping I walked to a vantage point on the top floor of the car park. I was surprised to see it gave me a clear view of the partially collapsed wall of a supermarket on the opposite side of the road.

Only having my mobile phone I took a few photos, just to show my wife. However, when I got home I decided to email them to the local paper. Mainly to alert them, so that they could get one of their own photographers there. I didn’t think my photos would be worthy of being published.

Imagine my surprise when they actually published my photo and credited me (top right corner of the picture in the paper).

Even more surprising when they highlighted the photo again 19 years later on their Facebook page under the headline ‘Do you remember……’

The vantage point you can see from Street View! the corner of the car park on the 4th floor.

It doesn’t matter what camera you have, being in the right place at the right time is what matters! Even with a very retro (now) 1.3 Megapixel phone camera!!

As a footnote, the wall was only exterior ‘decoration’ the internal wall was the load bearing wall, the building didn’t collapse and the exterior wall was quickly repaired. Why it collapsed I don’t know. Water ingress may be.

Sticky Rubber!

It might sound embarrassing to admit, but the day you put your hand in to your camera bag and go to grab that lens or camera body you haven’t used for a few months only to discover the rubber parts have become all sticky and your fingers get coated in a black mess is not a good day….

However, there is a solution to this issue that I have used on a couple of my camera bodies and a couple of lenses that were functioning just fine, but the rubber grips on the bodies or the lens rings had started to become this sticky mess.

Yes it is a car care product that I had on the shelf already. With just a very small amount on an old fluffy hand towel and then rubbed carefully on to the grip and in to the rings on the focus/zoom ring. And then buffed using a clean part of the old towel the rubber came back as good as new.

Every couple of years I make a point or repeating this treatment. Making sure to not let any of the gel like product enter the camera body or lens and the rubber parts don’t seem to go bad ever again.

You can apply the gel with a cotton bud if you need to get it in to smaller confined spaces.

It will also work on any other gadgets that have some form of rubberised coating.

Keep your gear in top working order and don’t stop using it just because it has become sticky!!

Using AI in your photography hobby

 

This post is not about using AI to generate images, you will find plenty of hints on how to create your next Instagram Influencer elsewhere!

Like Lucy Lumen and Liminal Frames, I have a ‘fleet’ of cameras of different brands and vintages.

As I like using them all at various times as the mood takes me. I’m always running in to minor issues. Mainly with my own memory on where do I find a particular setting or feature!

I also come across some problems from time to time as well.

In the past I’ve just put the question in to a search engine or searched the manual PDF for the setting I was looking for.

However, recently I’ve been using the ChatGPT app on my MacBook or my iPhone to ask it these questions.

It produces accurate results every time, not just a list of sites that ‘might’ have the answer to the question. I’ve tried this several times in recent weeks and it’s been very satisfactory in quickly finding answers. It also shows the source of the information so you can go back to that and find out even more detailed information.

Give it a try you might be surprised….

Other AI apps of course exist, Co-Pilot, Le Chat Mistral, etc

What mode do you use?

Most cameras whether they are mirrorless or single lens reflex and some compacts have a variety of shooting modes.

The most common ones are Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, Manual, Auto and Program modes.

There is no one mode that it the only one you should use, but you need to understand the differences between the different modes that your camera can shoot in.

In Auto mode the camera will decide the shutter speed and aperture and possibly the ISO speed to use, when you press the shutter button the camera will auto-focus and then take the shot, simple. A lot of people will not use Auto mode because the lack of control, but in fact if you don’t have time to change and adjust settings it might be the difference between capturing an image or missing it altogether.

In Shutter Priority mode the photographer sets their desired shutter speed and the camera will adjust the aperture automatically to get the correct exposure. This mode is useful when you are trying to capture sports or any other high speed action. But you can also use it at much slower shutter speeds as well.

In Aperture Priority mode the photographer selects the aperture they wish to use and the camera automatically adjusts the shutter speed to get the correct exposure. Changing your aperture doesn’t just change the amount of light reaching the sensor/film, but more importantly the depth of field of the resulting image.

With Aperture Priority mode you need to be careful that the shutter speed selected doesn’t become too slow that you end up in a camera shake situation. You can compensate for this by increasing the ISO speed to bring the shutter speed back up again for your selected aperture.

In Manual Mode you will have control over all three parameters, shutter speed, aperture and ISO speed. The camera is just feeding you the current meter reading for the exposure, so you just have to be aware that the metering mode will influence the value and the photographer can adjust the settings to suit the image they are capturing depending on the variation of the contrast in the image.

Program Mode if it is offered is a fixed curve that exists within the camera that lets you adjust the shutter speed and aperture in a fixed relative ratio to each other. Have a look at the manual for your camera to see how that setting works, they aren’t all the same.

You will also find other modes offered such as automatic depth mode, where you focus on the furtherest subject and then the nearest subject and the camera will select the appropriate aperture for that required depth of field.

Your camera might also have a number of ‘creative modes’ where the settings are biased in a particular way depending on the category of image you are taking (landscape, nighttime, sports, macro etc..) Again check your camera manual for the details of these, as some of them will lock out certain functions on the camera when these modes are selected.

What mode do you typically use the most?