Finally getting to appreciate my iPhone camera

I use my iPhone cam­era exten­sive­ly when run­ning work­shops. It is a great tool to demon­strate pos­si­ble com­po­si­tions and explain tech­niques and the impact of dif­fer­ent cam­era angles. When I bought the iPhone some 18 months ago it was my inten­tion to use it as a replace­ment for a com­pact cam­era. It was cer­tain­ly more expen­sive than one — eye water­ing so. I went for the ​‘Pro’ ver­sion as it had the ultra wide angle lens on it, the per­spec­tives of which I am quite par­tial to.

Despite being emplyed suc­cess­ful­ly on work­shops as men­tioned, I have nev­er used any of the images cap­tured. I had down­loaded some images but thought that they weren’t real­ly good enough. I sup­pose I was com­par­ing them to my Nikon D850 which is not real­ly rea­son­able. I have been run­ning a few work­shops down in Rye recent­ly and had cap­tured quite a few images which looked, on the phone, quite good. Indeed, I had com­po­si­tions and sub­jects that I had nev­er cap­tured on my DSLR and thought that they would be good can­di­dates for this very web site.

Run­ning a long expo­sure work­shop, I use an app called ​‘Spec­tre’ which allows you to make long expo­sure images. This means that you have to hold the cam­era very still and as such cam­era move­ment is a real issue when look­ing at the images on a full screen. So this can be quite lim­it­ing restrict­ing you to small­er dis­plays or cre­at­ing com­pos­ites like the one above. Post pro­cess­ing in Adobe Cam­era Raw and Pho­to­shop can help the images quite alot though I have to con­fess you don’t real­ly have to do much with them.

What is amaz­ing is the abil­i­ty of the cam­era to shoot into the sun and expose cor­rect­ly. It is ver­sa­tile and most impor­tant­ly it is the cam­era you always have with you — which is the best cam­era to have!