Photography

Cuprajake Not 100% sold

Why?

I have also always had Nikons, and recently got a Canon. I have gone a little off photography in recent years, and my wife is now the main photographer. The Nikon was big and heavy, and she wasn’t very happy with the quality anymore. We were mainly using cheap, slow zoom kit lenses. Optics weren’t fantastic, and slow apertures meant poor photos in low light, no great bokeh and this sort of thing. We felt the few simple primes we had were also not cutting it. I ended up getting a mirrorless Canon, but was also not sold on the quality and it doesn’t get used much.

My feeling is that we might be spoiled by better and better cameras on phones. Software wizardry is replacing amazing old school optics and creating pictures that are pleasing to the eye when watched on a screen (so 99.99% of the time), not to mention the convenience of having the camera in your hand all of the time anyway. Professionals would probably frown and say it is cheating, not worthy etc., but we are not professionals and we don’t care - we just want to point-and-shoot photos that we can enjoy looking at.

Before getting the Canon I tried to persuade my wife that a better phone is what she would want, not another “real” camera. She wasn’t convinced and we got the mirrorless, but reality is the quality of the photos doesn’t justify the inconvenience. We would need to put in much more effort (and maybe better lenses) to make it worth while.

So ended up getting my wife a new phone and she is finally happy with the photos. It’s not even a flagship, and the cost was less than half the price of the Canon body with a basic kit zoom lens.

What aperture was that shot at @Cuprajake? It looks like your 50mm is fairly fast at 1.8 but I’d expect more separation and bokeh if that was shot wide open.

If you end up considering another camera, I strongly recommend checking out Fuji. The size/weight of the body and lenses is a game changer compared to the styling of the original larger Canon/Nikon DSLRs.

There’s the Sony A series too although for stills I much prefer Fuji.

An X-T3 and 35mm 1.4 can be had for well under a grand and will excel at basically anything. Also has the Fuji JPEG film simulations which are incredibly good.

I just took these at 35mm 1.4 to show what I mean:

Ernie1 An X-T3 and 35mm 1.4 can be had for well under a grand and will excel at basically anything.

Less than a grand, you say? Well this photo was taken with a phone I got off eBay a week ago for £230. It’s a zero effort point and shoot, first attempt in terrible kitchen lighting just now. Yes, I know photo professionals will probably thrash it, but it’s good enough for me [and the phone can do a few other things too]):

Doram

I’m not going to argue that smartphone cameras these days aren’t incredibly good and at macro focal lengths can be indistinguishable from an actual camera.

But I also know if we stood 12 feet back from the subject and took the same shot it would be a completely different outcome.

If someone can shoot everything they want at one focal length then yeah, a phone is a good option.

Ernie1 But I also know if we stood 12 feet back from the subject and took the same shot it would be a completely different outcome.

D’you know what? I thought exactly the same when I got the mirrorless Canon. Now that I have both I can tell you that at 12 feet the phone will kick the camera in the backside every time for me. The camera doesn’t even come close.

By the way, this phone doesn’t have a close-up lens (just two lenses: wide angle and normal). It’s all software magic, and it rocks.

Ernie1 Doram

In terms of lenses though. With a camera if you put a 50, or 85mm lens on and shoot a portrait at 1.2 or something from a distance, and shoot the same shot with a smartphone, there’ll be no focal point on the phone, it’ll just all be in focus. It might be sharp, well rendered colour etc, but the camera will have beautiful depth of field (blurring the foreground and background) and far more actual sharpness.

I know there’s ‘portrait mode’ etc these days where software attempts to blur the background but it’s not really the same.

I have been taking photos with real cameras for decades, including professionally for a newspaper, so I know what depth of field is. :-)

The Tabasco bottle shot above was taken with the phone’s portrait mode. Not only could I make the background more or less blurry as I please, I can also change it after taking the photo (even if it wasn’t taken in portrait mode). Yes, it’s not exactly the same affect as my Nikkor 60mm 2.8 Macro lens, but I would argue 99% of people (including myself) would say the photo from the phone is better. Not to mention that the Nikkor lens on its own would cost almost three times what I spent on the phone.

The point I’m trying to make is that for a long time I refused to believe that phone companies could compete with photographic giants such as Nikon, Canon et al. in the photography arena. Given their experience, their history, their optics, the physical available size and the prices of their products, I was convinced that anything a phone can do, they can do much better. I couldn’t fathom the idea that a phone could compete with any of that. I assumed that while phone cameras were racing forward, cameras were doing the same with their technology. When my camera was lagging, I thought a new camera will surely be a huge step forward. But it wasn’t.

And when I look at the photos, I have to go with my eyes and admit to what I though was impossible until just recently - that the tables have turned. Maybe not for the top professional photography, but certainly for your every day photo needs.