Pros and cons of iPhone photography

P r o s a n d C o n s o f iPhone photography

Sometimes when I look at pictures taken on my iPhone, I wonder why I still buy expensive gear that’s these factors for you.

The pros

heavy and a huge burden to travel with. How convenient it would be to carry nothing but an iPhone as I lead photography tours all over the world! The reason I don’t do that is because as good as iPhone photography is, there are limitations and drawbacks. Let me compare and contrast Obviously, the first advantage of an iPhone (or any smartphone) is its compact size and virtual weightlessness. It fits into a pocket and is always ready at a moment’s notice to capture a slice of life like my cat, Ming, stretching in his bed, below. Grabbing my Canon R5 and choosing the settings would have taken at least a minute or

two, and I would have lost the moment.

Next, the cost is not only affordable, but pretty much everyone already has one. No other investment is necessary. You don’t have to buy more lenses, extra batteries, a tripod, filters, or flash cards.

The image quality has evolved so much it truly boggles the mind. The icicles on the previous page is a good example. Colors are beautiful, the images are unbelievably sharp, and each picture seems to be processed like an HDR composite in that there is trememdous detail in both the shadows and the highlights.

In addition, the camera does wonders in low light environments. Photographic situations that would normally require a tripod and a long exposure are handled beautifully with the iPhone while handholding it. The ease with which you use an iPhone is amazing. With one push of a button, the exposure is perfect. No histograms, no exposure compensation, no mistakes. The selfie my wife took, above, with a white sky, white snow, and our large white dog centrally placed in the composition shows what the iPhone meter is capable of. On the next page, you can see that shooting in a snowy forest and directly into the sun, again, isn’t a problem for the iPhone.

With recent iPhone models, you can change focal lengths from medium telephoto to normal to wide angle with the push of a button. There is even an automatic macro mode that allows you to shoot extremely close to small objects.

Switching from still photography to video is as simple, and so is selecting pano mode where you can take visually compelling panorama images. The iPhone automatically stitches the frames

The cons

The biggest disadvantage of an iPhone is the megapixel count. An iPhone photograph opens up in Photoshop as a 34.9 megabyte file. This is very good, but it’s not enough quality to satisfy discerning photographers. You can definitely make a good quality 16x20 inch print with this size file, and images with iPhones can even be sold as magazine covers.

By comparison, though, a file from the Canon R5 opens up to 128 megabytes. This means you can make huge prints and expect superior quality. You can also crop images significantly (for example, when capturing a small bird that’s just a little too far away) and still end up with a high resolution file. This is hugely important. Hi res images give you a lot of options. Having said that, if your only goal in photography is to post images on social media, attach emails with pictures, and text pictures to friends, then you will never need a camera that provides high resolution.

The second problem with iPhones for serious photographers is capturing action. You don’t have control over shutter speeds, so for fast moving subjects like birds in flight or galloping horses, it’s not possible to take tack sharp images. Also, there is a slight delay between the time you push the shutter button and when the image is recorded. With action photography, milliseconds count. In addition, if your finger isn’t squarely on the shutter button, the shutter

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won’t fire the camera. You can be looking at a moving subject and not paying attention to where your finger is positioned on the iPhone and miss the moment.

You can shoot multiple frames in a burst on the iPhone, and the number of frames per second is 10. That’s quite good, but not as good as 20 frames per second or more that mirrorless cameras now offer. For birds that fly very fast with an incredible number of wing-beats per second, 10 fps isn’t enough. You’d never get a sharp picture of a lilac-breasted roller in flight (below) with an iPhone 13. For this image, I used a Canon 500mm f/4 along with the 1Dx Mark II at 14 frames per second, and the shutter speed was 1/3200th of a second.

Another important issue is the lack of serious telephoto capability. When photographing distant subjects, the iPhone can’t fill the frame with them. There is a telephoto feature that is equivalent to 77mm, but for wildlife, birds, sports, and so many other subjects, this isn’t nearly enough.

There is a digital zoom function in the iPhone, but this is analagous to cropping an image in Photoshop. A cropped image may improve the composition, but the number of pixels is reduced and the image loses sharpness. That’s exactly what a digital zoom does. An optical zoom, on the other hand, is analagous to switching from a medium telephoto to a much longer lens. The number of pixels remains the same, the quality isn’t compromised, plus the image appears closer, i.e., it fills more of the frame. That’s what you can do with a dSLR or a mirrorless camera; with the iPhone, you’re limited by the medium telephoto lens and the poor quality digital zoom. §