iOS: Photography Department (1)

My switch to iOS had something to do with how the system handles pictures. In every application you can copy a picture to teh system clipboard and then paste it in any other application. That includes screen captures, which after simple trim or retouch can end up just in the clipboard, not messing up the photo library. To my knowledge this is not possible on Android (well, maybe it is after installing some clever apps, but on a plain Android no copy/pasting photos nor screenshots).

But this time I wanted to discuss a bit more the iPhone (Pro) photo taking capabilities rather than how the system handles pictures. Of course I was expecting a big jump from my 6-years-old Blackberry to iPhone 15. After all phones' photographic capabilities have been the area of the most progress. Both on the physical/hardware size as well as the computational aspects.

The improvements start from things almost unnoticed (unless you did not have them before), such as water/dust proof construction and sapphire lens glass, which mean your optics will always be clean. And don't even try any "lens protectors". The sapphire glass will not scratch, while the protectors will significantly degrade the quality of photos.

The camera "app" is not the best. It is almost as good as iTunes - Apple's flagship app. But this does not matter too much, as it is the software behind the user interface, which is really doing the job.

My biggest surprise have been low light (mostly night) shots. They are unreal. You can shoot 10 second exposures handheld and 30 second with some support. The phone captures the accelerometer data and makes judgement about how long exposure it can allow. There is some image stabilization of course, but none In-Body Image Stabilization (IBIS) can go that far. iPhone is aligning and stacking multiple images in real time. It probably uses the accelerometer / gyroscope data to aid the stabilization / stacking. The photo presented here was taken handheld in almost total darkness. The EXIF data says 2s / ISO 4000 but that is not true. It was full 10 seconds and it was so dark that I barely could see the tree I leaned against to have more stable grip.

Such photo of course would be possible with traditional camera too, given a tripod and then some time with a stacking software on a computer. The power of iPhone (and many other advanced camera phones) is it can apply all sorts of computational techniques in place.

The point-and-shoot paradigm has been redefined through this effortless automagic.