> Much of that can be fixed with shooting raw and editing in Lightroom, which is the same process you'd use for a bigger camera. .. As for printing, it matters how it's being viewed. You're looking at it up close, which is the physical equivalent of pixel peeping and relatively rare.
The photos were printed and displayed in a gallery. I didn't need to pull out a magnifying glass to notice which images were a bit blurry. It was obvious at a glance. The images in question were worse. There was one beautiful B&W image of a Meerkat, and you could see each strand of hair on his belly. Another image was a lion's face - and the hairs were all a little blurry. I think the photographer cropped in on the image past the usable resolution of their camera. I'm sure it looked fine on a phone, but it didn't make a great print. Shooting raw and editing in lightroom can't replace missing pixels.
Quality doesn't matter until it does. And then it really matters!
The thing I really hate about the photos I get from my phone is the over processing that the software applies to the images. Some part of my brain intuitively understands focal planes and how lights interact with the colour of objects. My phone produces images which just don't look right. They're in an uncanny valley where they don't quite make sense to my brain. Looking at them stresses me out a little.
Maybe its worth trying my phone with RAW images, so I can turn all that crap off.
> people seem to think "DSLRs" are the higher quality competitors to phone cameras, but they aren't particularly high quality as far as these things go.
It really depends on the camera and the photographer, and what kind of quality you're going for. DSLRs can make use of larger lenses. As a result, you get natural depth-of-field as a consequence of the optics. If you're using an old digital camera, there's a good chance the sensor isn't as modern as the sensor in your phone. So you might get worse low-light performance and worse autofocus. But the depth of field is impossible to recreate optically using the tiny lenses on a phone. Phones can simulate DoF using computational tricks, but it never looks quite right. A person's face will be in focus and some of their hair out of focus. Its weird.
My dad took some photos of me when I was a kid some ~30 years ago on his old SLR film camera. They're stunning photos. Those photos are much more beautiful than the photos he takes now on his iphone.
And yeah - I'd love to put some vintage glass on my mirrorless camera. Aah its an expensive hobby!
astrange
> And yeah - I'd love to put some vintage glass on my mirrorless camera. Aah its an expensive hobby!
Only if you get DSLR lenses! Rangefinder lenses are cheap and smaller (because they don't need to work with the SLR mirror), but the adapters are typically manual focus/aperture.
The photos were printed and displayed in a gallery. I didn't need to pull out a magnifying glass to notice which images were a bit blurry. It was obvious at a glance. The images in question were worse. There was one beautiful B&W image of a Meerkat, and you could see each strand of hair on his belly. Another image was a lion's face - and the hairs were all a little blurry. I think the photographer cropped in on the image past the usable resolution of their camera. I'm sure it looked fine on a phone, but it didn't make a great print. Shooting raw and editing in lightroom can't replace missing pixels.
Quality doesn't matter until it does. And then it really matters!
The thing I really hate about the photos I get from my phone is the over processing that the software applies to the images. Some part of my brain intuitively understands focal planes and how lights interact with the colour of objects. My phone produces images which just don't look right. They're in an uncanny valley where they don't quite make sense to my brain. Looking at them stresses me out a little.
Maybe its worth trying my phone with RAW images, so I can turn all that crap off.
> people seem to think "DSLRs" are the higher quality competitors to phone cameras, but they aren't particularly high quality as far as these things go.
It really depends on the camera and the photographer, and what kind of quality you're going for. DSLRs can make use of larger lenses. As a result, you get natural depth-of-field as a consequence of the optics. If you're using an old digital camera, there's a good chance the sensor isn't as modern as the sensor in your phone. So you might get worse low-light performance and worse autofocus. But the depth of field is impossible to recreate optically using the tiny lenses on a phone. Phones can simulate DoF using computational tricks, but it never looks quite right. A person's face will be in focus and some of their hair out of focus. Its weird.
My dad took some photos of me when I was a kid some ~30 years ago on his old SLR film camera. They're stunning photos. Those photos are much more beautiful than the photos he takes now on his iphone.
And yeah - I'd love to put some vintage glass on my mirrorless camera. Aah its an expensive hobby!