Camera gear discussions

I just don't enjoy taking photos with a phone. Especially since the standard design has been to put the camera(s) in one corner (to accommodate bigger batteries?) which is just where I want my fingers to go. I'm not even comfortable holding the thing for photography.

(But if it's all I've got with me...)

 

I thought about grabbing one of these for my father now that he finally gave up on his DSLR and just uses his smartphone now: https://www.amazon.com/ULANZI-Smart...g/dp/B0B6TNCHCN/ref=sr_1_4?crid=26U8M3ETCE7UD

 

I have come to the conclusion that the iPhone oversharpening and fake looking HDR and portrait modes, etc. are all trying to look good on screens at lower resolutions. For example, this is the same picture of my D750 I took with my iPhone 13 Pro, but at 100% zoomed in:



Look at all the scrunching due to the oversharpening. More complicated curves look even worse zoomed in. I know this is an example of pixel peeping, but I think it is important to understand how something like an iPhone is maniuplating the final .jpg or .heic or whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I also took this picture of my son before his first day of 2nd grade last week with my iPhone in portrait mode:



Nearly dang professional looking (although I was lucky this morning with the clouds providing just the right amount of filtering). Although if I went to print a large photo of this or even crop it, it may not look as good and I think it even lost something in the .heic to .jpg conversion (I could be wrong). [PS - I almost grabbed my Nikon D750 for this shot, but I was crunched for time trying to catch the bus and it is still a new camera I am trying to learn] But phones But phone cameras can take place of the standard run of the mill everyday stuff, even if I might fumble my phone trying to get a good pic.

Although there are SO many more reasons cameras in phone suck.

 

If phones are killing photography it is not so much because they are getting better at it (doubtless, yes, of course they are) but because they now tend to be the thing on which photographs are seen. Sometimes I post pics to Whatsapp from the concert hall: later I might find that the pic, on my PC screen, is not even in focus!

I take care in the taking and editing of my pics. Within my limited skills at both, I make them as good as I can. But I know that very many of them are never going to be looked at bigger than... a phone screen.

That's life.

I'm sure your camera ( +you! ) would have done a better job at your son's portrait. I'm guessing that the hair would have been better, and the skin more natural. But hey, you had the phone with you, and it was able to capture a piece of family history, looking pretty good. So it is a winner.

 

Funny enough, Chris Niccolls with PetaPixel (formerly DP Review, formerly The Camera Store) posted a video on this topic today:

 

@Azimuth - just shoot raw on your iPhone.

 

I'm friends with folks at Ulanzi and they make some decent gear.

But issue with these grips is simple - They only work when you are actively shooting with your phone. Suddenly your phone doesn't fit your pocket anymore and you end up either holding it in hand all the time or putting it in some shoulder bag. So, in my opinion, it's decent if you go to one location where you will be taking photos / shooting video almost non-stop. But it's not really practical for like traveling, when you have to move from place to place and will be putting phone away or using it for its other functions.



On the topic of phone vs camera, I don't want to use my phone as a camera simply because so much things rely on the phone. Especially in China, the phone is my wallet, bus card, keys to my house, during covid health pass to any building, etc. Knowing what things I do with my cameras, I'm not willing to expose my phone to the same risks

 

to keep relevant to the Camera Gear topic... Canon 7d mkii, 70-200 f2.8 IS w/ 1.4x extender - handheld
-------edit------
No, that's not @YMO

 

You mean exposing your phone to the risks of whatever you do with your DLSR cameras is greater than the risks of living in a totalitarian regime, where the state tracks your every move, spies on you and your family, can reduce your social credit score at the drop of a hat, can instigate legal proceedings against you for no apparent reason or evidence other than from suspicion or fear of nefarious activities on your part and then throw you in jail following a closed trial.... all from monitoring you via your phone?

Yeah, regarding exposing your phone to 'risks' I'd say those were pretty comparable.

 

That monkey looks EXACTLY how I look first thing in the morning. Especially the hair on it's head! lool
'Where's my coffee?'

 

....... Yeah, not sure how I should even react to this.

Maybe go post at r/China on Reddit, I think that would be more fitting space for this than a camera thread on Hi-Fi forum.

 

Yeah, we all live where we live, with freedoms and lack thereof built in.

I'm somewhat the opposite. I don't buy expensive phones. In the photographic scheme of things, my camera gear is not super expensive either, but it is a lot lot more than my phone.

Sure. I accept all the reasons I should. But I have so far not found/learnt a raw processing package that runs on Linux with which I can quickly add just that little bit extra to my camera's jpegs. I like my camera's jpegs!

(I'm currently looking at the possibility of using some of that Windows AI stuff. Virtual Machine (VirtualBox=fail because dismal svga display standard) or maybe one Windows SSD that I can boot from when I want to --- but that's a heap of Linux/Windows techie questions that go far outside a camera/pics thread.)

Actually, I think we all do! The one run by Google, Meta, Microsoft and the others.

Since I started taking an interest in this stuff, Adstagram has been super-spamming me with Topaz stuff.

 

No reaction necessary.
Merely giving some realistic context to your frivolous generalisation about 'risk' for someone living under a totalitarian regime.

Going further, I would propose that one of the inherent benefits of using a DSLR in comparison to a phone is that as long as a DSLR is not connected via wifi/bluetooth to any 3rd party software apps then it, as well as its' contents are relatively safe from being spied on.

Generalising, it goes for anyone living in any part of the world where people unwittingly allow organisations; Facebook, Instagram, Google etc not only access to their photographs but also to the entire data content of their phones.

Just a thought, when comparing phones to cameras. You know - for context within this thread.

 

This comment was for @Azimuth , since he doesn't like how the iPhone processes the images.

 

Oh, ok. I'm used to getting stick for working with jpegs!

 

And yes, I get I can get RAW images from my iPhone and process them myself, but doesn't that beat the whole purpose of having a convenient photos and camera always available. I mean, I already have to deal with .heic. Which would not be much of an issue if I used a Mac computer I guess. Lol.

But yes, I know many people who used the early mirroless Sony's like me with the A6000 and others with the A7 shot in RAW almost exclusively to NOT use their processing and got much closer to what Nikon already outputs as a .jpg. There are already tons lens corrections you can load into Lightroom. The new ones past the A7III I read are much better.

I only pointed out that issue with oversharpening with my iPhone because I never noticed that with my Samsung S10. It makes some of my shots look really weird.

 

A few years ago I switched from Android to iPhone, and yeah iPhone is way over-processed.

I switch RAW mode on for photos that I'm gonna care about the quality, and leave it off for the rest of the time. (There's an on-camera-screen button)

You can choose to use heic or jpg for compatibility in settings.

 

Fujifilm has suspended sales of the X-S20 and X-T5 in japan

https://petapixel.com/2023/10/27/fu...ders-for-the-x-t5-and-x-s20-cameras-in-japan/

 

I wanted to respond to this but looks like Chris Cables profile has been deleted. @Bina sorry you have to deal with this crap.