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I'm new to photography and I've invested heavily in the mirrorless ecosystem in the past year. I can't echo this articles sentiment enough. For 90-95% of use ca

by reedf1 6y ago

I'm new to photography and I've invested heavily in the mirrorless ecosystem in the past year. I can't echo this articles sentiment enough. For 90-95% of use cases my 2 grand camera is a lame duck. I regularly wondered if the love of my camera was simply some sunk cost bias towards it. I've been mostly cured of this thought through the reactions of people. A "holy sh*t" when I show them a long-exposure of the stars. A whispered "oh my god" when I show them a shot with beautiful bokeh. And to me - as a physicist - the act catching the edge cases, that extra 5% of shots. The stuff you need a good sensor and a nice piece of glass to capture. That's what I find exciting.

StavrosK 6y ago
When you get into heavy postprocessing, the dynamic range of the phone can't hold a candle to that of the camera, though. It's just night and day. There's no way you could retrieve this much detail from a phone sensor: https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/ https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  The top version of the photo is really nice. It could easily have come from a good phone camera. The bottom version... OK, my phone can't do that. If it did, I'd take it to the Apple store to see if they could fix it.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Thanks for the feedback.
  - miahi 6y ago
    I would say your phone can do that, it's just that you did not enable HDR. The thing is, because of how our eyes and brain work (huge dynamic range plus postprocessing), the actual viewed scene was probably closer to the second photo than the first, but with a higher contrast (the camera HDR emulates the eye but you also need a huge dynamic range display to show it right, otherwise it's "compressed" to low contrast). So you can choose the contrast (first photo) or dynamic range (second photo) but not both.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      That's not very accurate because the colors in the clouds were inverted in this photo, but you're right that reality is a bit more contrasty, though not as contrasty as we think (nowhere close to the "after").
    - CamperBob2 6y ago
      My comment came out sounding somewhat mean, which wasn't my intention, but the truth is that I'm not a big fan of HDR and related artificial effects. These effects don't look anything like the imagery perceived by my eyes and brain; they're just different ways to ruin a good photo. In this case, a very good photo.
      - sukilot 6y ago
        Non-HDR isn't anything like what your eyes see.
        CamperBob2 6y ago
        Once dynamic range is lost by rendering something on a phone screen or computer monitor, you can't recover it without making the image look weird and artificial. It's like mixing 24-bit audio for playback through an 8-bit DAC. You can play all sorts of games with dynamic range expansion, but at the end of the day you've done a bad thing. Then there's the fact that a lot of problems people try to solve with HDR are actually gamma correction issues. Of course, I may just not be taking the right drugs...
- raziel2p 6y ago
  That is a really cool picture. However, it does stray so far from reality that I wonder if you couldn't just as well get someone skilled to spend a couple of hours in photoshop achieving the same effect even without the added range. Probably tweaking sliders in lightroom is more time-efficient, and there's an argument to be made for using the camera as an artistic tool and not just a lens to capture a still picture of your surroundings, but I don't think this is a great example of what isn't possible without a "real" camera.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    I guess maybe something like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg
kevstev 6y ago
I had a Canon T3i for a long time- it was given to me as a honeymoon gift and while at first I was kind of annoyed with it, I became really interested in photography and took it with me everywhere. The last trip I took it on was in 2018, and my father in law had a pixel- maybe a pixel 2- but I think the original. We were under a roman theater, it was very dim, but we both took a few pictures as it was a really interesting scene. His pictures just blew mine out of the water- mine you could hardly make out the details, his looked like it was well lit. I was in the process of looking to upgrade, and actually for that trip was hoping I could get an A7 III, (~2k for those unfamiliar with cameras), and eventually did a few months later, and even with a "G" lens (not highest end, but still ~$1k USD just for the lens), the gap between my wife's iphone and even my Galaxy S8 for "typical" photos is really small, and for certain types of action and low-light shots, the cell phones are superior. I am not sure if I will ever buy another "proper" camera again. People talked for years about the limits of physics on lenses and light and such, but software can overcome those limitations for the most part. It makes me sad, and I maybe even feel a little foolish for spending a few thousand dollars on equipment that is quickly becoming unnecessary for most of my uses.

by reedf1 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago

When you get into heavy postprocessing, the dynamic range of the phone can't hold a candle to that of the camera, though. It's just night and day. There's no way you could retrieve this much detail from a phone sensor: https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/ https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/

CamperBob2 6y ago
The top version of the photo is really nice. It could easily have come from a good phone camera. The bottom version... OK, my phone can't do that. If it did, I'd take it to the Apple store to see if they could fix it.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback.
- miahi 6y ago
  I would say your phone can do that, it's just that you did not enable HDR. The thing is, because of how our eyes and brain work (huge dynamic range plus postprocessing), the actual viewed scene was probably closer to the second photo than the first, but with a higher contrast (the camera HDR emulates the eye but you also need a huge dynamic range display to show it right, otherwise it's "compressed" to low contrast). So you can choose the contrast (first photo) or dynamic range (second photo) but not both.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    That's not very accurate because the colors in the clouds were inverted in this photo, but you're right that reality is a bit more contrasty, though not as contrasty as we think (nowhere close to the "after").
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    My comment came out sounding somewhat mean, which wasn't my intention, but the truth is that I'm not a big fan of HDR and related artificial effects. These effects don't look anything like the imagery perceived by my eyes and brain; they're just different ways to ruin a good photo. In this case, a very good photo.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      Non-HDR isn't anything like what your eyes see.
      - CamperBob2 6y ago
        Once dynamic range is lost by rendering something on a phone screen or computer monitor, you can't recover it without making the image look weird and artificial. It's like mixing 24-bit audio for playback through an 8-bit DAC. You can play all sorts of games with dynamic range expansion, but at the end of the day you've done a bad thing. Then there's the fact that a lot of problems people try to solve with HDR are actually gamma correction issues. Of course, I may just not be taking the right drugs...
raziel2p 6y ago
That is a really cool picture. However, it does stray so far from reality that I wonder if you couldn't just as well get someone skilled to spend a couple of hours in photoshop achieving the same effect even without the added range. Probably tweaking sliders in lightroom is more time-efficient, and there's an argument to be made for using the camera as an artistic tool and not just a lens to capture a still picture of your surroundings, but I don't think this is a great example of what isn't possible without a "real" camera.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I guess maybe something like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg

kevstev 6y ago

I had a Canon T3i for a long time- it was given to me as a honeymoon gift and while at first I was kind of annoyed with it, I became really interested in photography and took it with me everywhere. The last trip I took it on was in 2018, and my father in law had a pixel- maybe a pixel 2- but I think the original. We were under a roman theater, it was very dim, but we both took a few pictures as it was a really interesting scene. His pictures just blew mine out of the water- mine you could hardly make out the details, his looked like it was well lit. I was in the process of looking to upgrade, and actually for that trip was hoping I could get an A7 III, (~2k for those unfamiliar with cameras), and eventually did a few months later, and even with a "G" lens (not highest end, but still ~$1k USD just for the lens), the gap between my wife's iphone and even my Galaxy S8 for "typical" photos is really small, and for certain types of action and low-light shots, the cell phones are superior. I am not sure if I will ever buy another "proper" camera again. People talked for years about the limits of physics on lenses and light and such, but software can overcome those limitations for the most part. It makes me sad, and I maybe even feel a little foolish for spending a few thousand dollars on equipment that is quickly becoming unnecessary for most of my uses.