Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone photos

Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by gambiting on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @02:20PM (#23406772)

I mean, I don't get this argument at all, I have several photos taken with my phone printed on A3 format and hanging around my house, I don't see any issue with them that would show they were taken on a phone. In comparison I have a few pictures printed out, taken with an old W1 Sony camera and they are awful, would take pictures from my phone over those any time.

Here's my latest printed picture: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h6P5ZbNjQ5FD9nkzdB_TnfsA4li...

And the actual source image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iVenWHP4TesmhTWAY2qMDQs21u3...

Having said all of this - I find it incredibly rare for people to print photos at all, which is pretty sad in itself. I get not needing albums, but having pictures to hang on the walls is always nice.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by AuryGlenz on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @02:51PM (#23407193)

I don't mean to be critical of your image - I'm always glad when someone is happy enough with any image to actually print it! That said that is an insanely ideal condition. It's during the day, with snow being a natural reflector.

It's well exposed but like pretty much all cell phone pictures it's oversharpened. This was taken during my first year doing professional photography, so don't be too harsh. It's probably a good comparison for that reason though: https://imgur.com/6qtTl89

That would have been with an D3200 or D610, both of which are pretty old tech nowadays.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by xeromal on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @10:24PM (#23411632)

Love that photo of yours. I will chime in and say that good photos are like good audio equipment, the people that care will notice but the general population is happy with average. It's like that programming or engineering adage, the first 90% takes 10% of the time.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by ardit33 on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @02:44PM (#23407112)

you made the parent's point, your picture looks good, but still not as a good as a professional one, taken with a good camera

I have a mirrorless cameras, and time to time I use it... and the pictures I get with it are still much better than my iphonex

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by manmal on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @04:21PM (#23408161)

It’s the same for me. I have a quite cheap portrait lens for my old Sony Nex-3, and the pictures I get out of it are (subjectively) so much better than those taken with my iPhone XS, with actual bokeh and real depth.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by bergstromm466 on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @05:23PM (#23408958)

I mean, can anything really ever be objective? Or are things just continually witnessed, from tens - to trillions - of times?

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by manmal on Thursday June 04, 2020 @01:42AM (#23412949)

I would say if you perform a double blind study with a decent sample size, you will indeed reach objective conclusions, and you will even know the probability that your observation is correct.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by gambiting on Thursday June 04, 2020 @04:16AM (#23414024)

Right, but the parent's point was specifically that pictures taken on phones don't look good in large size....and all I'm saying is that yes, they do sometimes. Obviously had this been in the dark, the result would be abysmal. But in conditions like the ones in the picture? The print is completely ok in my(non-professional) opinion.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by rangibaby on Thursday June 04, 2020 @09:24AM (#23416232)

Better gear = a wider range of “sometimes”

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by frostburg on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @06:31PM (#23409700)

How big you can print depends a lot on how close you plan to look at the result. Subjectively I don't like cellphone pictures, even at small sizes where the resolution is entirely adequate: you can tell where there is less detail due to aggressive distortion correction, transitions between in focus and out of focus areas tend to be ugly etc.

https://i.lensdump.com/i/jpzeyr.jpg <- I took this with a camera from 2013 (a Sigma DP3 Merrill)

https://i.lensdump.com/i/jpzL73.jpg <- While I took this with a camera from 1996 and a lens from 1994 (Contax G2 and Zeiss Planar 2/45)

https://i.lensdump.com/i/jpzoID.jpg <- Camera from 1998, lens from 1990 (Leica M6 TTL, Elmarit-M 90/2.8), please ignore the dust on my scan and look at the transitions

(I should probably point out that these are all from relatively compact cameras, not even the size of a small full frame slr)

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by lmilcin on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @07:32PM (#23410344)

If you are only comparing number of details of photos made in standard conditions you are missing the point of a large sensor camera.

Actually, literally ANY camera can be used to make good photos. Cameras have sets of conditions they are good to work with. Smartphones, for examples, shine when you want really deep depth of field at standard lighting conditions.

As long as you know what the camera is good for it is possible for you to focus on the specific conditions and get nice pictures.

DSLR will allow for more freedom in the choice of conditions you can work with and still get good pictures and that is the whole point of using it.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by contravariant on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @03:23PM (#23407539)

Are you sure that that's the actual source? It seems to be suffering from compression artefacts slightly, and what might have been a somewhat overenthusiastic (i.e. sharp) downscaling.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by fock on Thursday June 04, 2020 @02:28AM (#23413248)

so... it's a cellphone picture. and yeah this is exactly making the case in point. Photos are ok, but in good to perfect light every camera does this.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by contravariant on Thursday June 04, 2020 @05:57AM (#23414633)

True but to some extent those problems could be alleviated if you could get to the actual source, which wouldn't have either of the problems I mentioned. Assuming I diagnosed things correctly, which is a bit tricky. The image has definitely been processed though, as evidenced by the ringing.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by gambiting on Thursday June 04, 2020 @01:03PM (#23419068)

The only change I did to it was removing a sewer drain in front of the car in photoshop(hence why it's called wallpaper fix) - I haven't done anything else to the photo. Here's the original original file, uploaded right now from my phone:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16QEm_kxED2vASTgRv8UvyaV4yTA...

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by contravariant on Thursday June 04, 2020 @04:00PM (#23421065)

Apparently I can't access that file but I'll believe you. Although if the original was jpg as well then it was somewhat unfortunate to save it as jpg again as that would result in additional compression artefacts (lossless jpg exists, but isn't exactly common).

That said it's hard to tell whether it's compression artefacts or some 'smart' sharpening that's responsible for the artefacts. It would need to have been compressed pretty heavily to fit in just 4MB.

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Re:Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone ph... by gambiting on Thursday June 04, 2020 @04:24PM (#23421324)

Ah, stupid drive permissions! I've enabled it for everyone now, if you'd like to have a look

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16QEm_kxED2vASTgRv8UvyaV4yTA...

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