Getting to grips with my iPhone

Smart­phones are gen­er­al­ly not regard­ed as ​‘prop­er’ cam­eras. How can they be? You basi­cal­ly need to do noth­ing except point and shoot. Fur­ther­more, the qual­i­ty of the images, whilst accept­able on a small screen, was not of suf­fi­cient qual­i­ty to edit or even print. This has not been true for some time now. The iPhone 15, the lat­est incar­na­tion of that par­tic­u­lar brand, uses a colour space of P3, which is rough­ly equiv­a­lent to ProPho­to RGB, which we use in our post pro­cess­ing in Light­room and Pho­to­shop, has a up to 48 megapix­el sen­sor, which is around the same as my Nikon D850 and a 2x zoom in, 3x and 7x zoom out opti­cal range. Throw in Night Mode, the capa­bil­i­ty to shoot in RAW, image sta­bil­i­sa­tion, and that is quite a cocktail. 

On paper, these spec­i­fi­ca­tions are impres­sive. Nonethe­less, look­ing at the files in great detail, they do not com­pare at all with mod­ern pro­sumer DSLRs or mir­ror­less cam­eras. But is this a problem?

You always have your phone with you. There’s that old say­ing, ​‘What is the best cam­era?’ Answer – ​‘the cam­era with you’. What­ev­er you see, wher­ev­er you are, you have your cam­era phone to hand. You can exper­i­ment freely, be cre­ative, and be curi­ous as to whether a scene or com­po­si­tion might work. When trav­el­ling with my DSLR and before get­ting it out of the bag, I will wan­der around, look­ing, try­ing to see suit­able can­di­dates to cap­ture and start to assess poten­tial com­po­si­tions. Often, I will pull out my phone and try the shot and eval­u­ate whether it is worth set­ting up the ​‘big’ camera.

You will see in this arti­cle what I con­sid­er to be rea­son­ably suc­cess­ful images tak­en on my iPhone. What I have dis­cov­ered is that it is indeed not as capa­ble as the DSLR. Great dynam­ic range is not han­dled well. High con­trast scenes do not trans­late well, and some colours, espe­cial­ly blues and greens, are more vibrant than I like. What we have to con­sid­er, though, is that the phone is giv­ing you a processed file in the form of a JPEG or equiv­a­lent. The algo­rithm or pro­cess­ing soft­ware is mak­ing deci­sions as to how to edit the file and present it at its ​‘best’. This is the same as using the auto but­ton in Light­room. Some­times it works, and some­times it doesn’t. How­ev­er, in more mod­ern phones, you can now shoot in raw, and this does make a dif­fer­ence. You can take con­trol and edit your files in Light­room or Adobe Cam­era Raw. The files still don’t com­pare to a DSLR or equiv­a­lent, but you have a lot more scope for post-pro­cess­ing. Last­ly, the files seem over-sharp­ened or even ​‘crunchy’, and this also needs to be addressed in editing

Per­haps one of the best fea­tures in using a phone is the dif­fer­ent apps that you can employ. I have been inspired by many mul­ti­ple expo­sure images that I have seen in the past few years, and have tak­en it upon myself to learn the tech­niques and exper­i­ment. On my DSLR, I have some capa­bil­i­ties to do this, but on the phone, I have far more sophis­ti­cat­ed options avail­able to me. I can use many more blend­ing modes, enlarge, reduce or rotate images, and use any pho­to ever tak­en on my phone and incor­po­rate it into the final com­pos­ite. Some apps allow you to take long expo­sures and shoot in Raw if your smart­phone does not offer this capability

I spent some time mak­ing prints to cre­ate a port­fo­lio of work. The phone files used were mul­ti­ple expo­sures and were, I have to say, very impres­sive. I print­ed these to 12 inch­es square. The files have a native res­o­lu­tion of 72 dpi, and chang­ing this to 180dpi for my Epson P900 print­er would allow me to print 16.5 by 21 inch­es, which is just about right for A2. The result­ing prints were excel­lent. You would be hard-pressed to tell what sort of cam­era they were tak­en on.

So, in con­clu­sion, I will be using my phone more and more for pho­tog­ra­phy. That doesn’t mean I am giv­ing up the DSLR any­time soon, but hav­ing anoth­er tool avail­able to me to pur­sue my more cre­ative endeav­ours will be more than welcome