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I found this interesting as I'm someone who used to travel with at least one camera most of the time, but I've recently come back from a holiday where I used my

I found this interesting as I'm someone who used to travel with at least one camera most of the time, but I've recently come back from a holiday where I used my iPhone 13 Pro as my only camera. Overall I actually found it a great experience – I love having an ultra wide angle lens in my pocket and after a bit of time getting used to it, I find the 3x zoom a more useful focal length than the 2x zoom on my previous iPhone X – but I did find the over-processing (the "painterly" look) frustrating, and even more annoying is that it will often use the wide angle lens and upscale rather than using the 3x zoom (even with ProRAW enabled – see [1]). I understand why the software makes these choices for the "average" user, but it would be nice to enable a "pro" mode which reduces noise reduction and favours the zoom lens in more situations. I ended up using the stock camera app for "snapshots" (e.g. photos where I didn't care too much about the quality, or where I was just using the wide angle lens), and Lightroom Mobile's camera for shots where I wanted more control, or when I wanted to ensure that the zoom lens was being used (Halide is also good for this, but I found it convenient to have the photos in LR Mobile for processing immediately, even if Lightroom's UX is clunkier). This actually worked pretty well for me – you can trust the stock camera to take a photo which will look good at mobile screen sizes even in challenging conditions, so it's great for "capturing the moment", while if you are taking a photo where you care about the details, it's usually not an issue to take a few extra seconds to open LR... but it would be nice to be able to do this in the stock camera. The results with RAWs from Lightroom are actually pretty impressive IMO – there's more noise than the stock camera, but I prefer this to the smudged noise reduction look and I'm sure with some processing I can find a happy medium. Even the ultra wide photos are reasonably sharp. This was a long way of saying that if you're frustrated by this issue, try a third party camera app and hopefully you'll find that you can get more out of the newer iPhone's great cameras, while still having the default camera there for quick snapshots! [1] https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography/ https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...

NikolaNovak 5y ago
You mean you cannot manually choose the lens on iPhone 13?? :O I have an old Samsung Note 8; I was contemplating Iphone 13 Pro for my wife so we can improve the casual/random photos of our kids, but that'd be a deal breaker :-< [context - we have Nikon d800, d7200, couple of d90's, V1, etc lying around the house so we do like photos, and being able to zoom or choose a lens is something we take for granted :]
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  You can manually choose the lens, but in edge cases where the stock camera app decides that you're too close to the subject to be able to focus with, e.g. the 3x lens, it switches to the 0.5x ultrawide lens instead, to maintain focus, and crops to maintain the same field of view. Using a non-stock app lets you force it to respect your lens setting, out-of-focus and all.
  - tomduncalf 5y ago
    Exactly this, also the iPhone "helps" you by sometimes digitally cropping the 1x image to the 3x field of view if the result from the 3x lens was not judged to be good enough. It has always done this to some extent, but as the other link I posted ([1]) describes, this both happens more frequently with the 3x lens on the 13 Pro than the 2x lens on previous generations because the 3x zoom has a smaller aperture than the 2x, and also the effect is more noticeable, because it's blowing a 1x image up to 3x rather than 2x. I hope Apple will offer some facility to tweak this in future as it seems to me it frequently chooses digital zoom rather than the zoom lens even in "not that challenging" conditions. I do get why they'd do this though – the reality is that if it always used the zoom lens, you'd end up with a lot more noisy/blurred photos due to physics – but it would be nice to say "I'm OK with that"! One other thing I should mention is that you can't set a third party camera app as the default, so the camera button on the lock screen always opens the stock camera. In practice I don't find this a huge issue, as if I'm grabbing a quick snapshot from the lock screen it might be of some fleeting moment, in which case I'd probably rather get a usable digitally zoomed image, than a blurry optical zoom one. [1] https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography/ https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    Had a very difficult time shooting a photo through a fence recently, because it kept switching lenses to focus one the fence itself, which changes the framing, making it difficult to adjust focus back.
  - ben7799 5y ago
    You've been able to disable this behavior since like a month after the iPhone 13/13 Pro came out. It's the auto-macro functionality in the camera settings. The default behavior switches to the ultra-wide below the minimum focus distance of the other two cameras.
spyspy 5y ago
I did the same for my honeymoon last fall. I hate carrying around a "full size" camera because 1) it's bulky and heavy and expensive so I have to worry about it constantly and 2) it makes me look like your standard tourist. Pocket. 13. Snap. Snap. Pocket. Go. Happy wife. Airdrop her the photos next time we sit down for food for upload to instagram.
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure I'll go back to using a full size camera except for situations which call for a specialist lens (e.g. going on safari, maybe astrophotography one day). I think for me the killer feature is that the photos are there on your phone (and in the cloud), ready to be browsed/shared/edited. I'm terrible for never getting round to downloading/editing the photos from an SD card!
  - spyspy 5y ago
    My Sony a6500 has been relegated to webcam duties.
    - kuschku 5y ago
      Honestly, I just carry my a6300 with me most of the time. I’ve used some of the modded apps that are available (it’s running android after all) to ensure I can single-click pair it to my phone and send all photos over, or send photos over automatically as soon as they’re taken. It’s just as convenient for quick sharing, and the photos are so much better.
      - sujinge9 5y ago
        Can you share what apps are? I'm highly interested. Main reason my a6000 is gathering dust is because saving to Google Photos is a pain.
        kuschku 5y ago
        There's a ftp uploader that's publicly available, but mostly I just wrote my own custom upload tool. Search for OpenMemories Framework, there's something of an unofficial SDK available.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

You mean you cannot manually choose the lens on iPhone 13?? :O I have an old Samsung Note 8; I was contemplating Iphone 13 Pro for my wife so we can improve the casual/random photos of our kids, but that'd be a deal breaker :-< [context - we have Nikon d800, d7200, couple of d90's, V1, etc lying around the house so we do like photos, and being able to zoom or choose a lens is something we take for granted :]

whoisburbansky 5y ago
You can manually choose the lens, but in edge cases where the stock camera app decides that you're too close to the subject to be able to focus with, e.g. the 3x lens, it switches to the 0.5x ultrawide lens instead, to maintain focus, and crops to maintain the same field of view. Using a non-stock app lets you force it to respect your lens setting, out-of-focus and all.
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  Exactly this, also the iPhone "helps" you by sometimes digitally cropping the 1x image to the 3x field of view if the result from the 3x lens was not judged to be good enough. It has always done this to some extent, but as the other link I posted ([1]) describes, this both happens more frequently with the 3x lens on the 13 Pro than the 2x lens on previous generations because the 3x zoom has a smaller aperture than the 2x, and also the effect is more noticeable, because it's blowing a 1x image up to 3x rather than 2x. I hope Apple will offer some facility to tweak this in future as it seems to me it frequently chooses digital zoom rather than the zoom lens even in "not that challenging" conditions. I do get why they'd do this though – the reality is that if it always used the zoom lens, you'd end up with a lot more noisy/blurred photos due to physics – but it would be nice to say "I'm OK with that"! One other thing I should mention is that you can't set a third party camera app as the default, so the camera button on the lock screen always opens the stock camera. In practice I don't find this a huge issue, as if I'm grabbing a quick snapshot from the lock screen it might be of some fleeting moment, in which case I'd probably rather get a usable digitally zoomed image, than a blurry optical zoom one. [1] https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography/ https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Had a very difficult time shooting a photo through a fence recently, because it kept switching lenses to focus one the fence itself, which changes the framing, making it difficult to adjust focus back.
- ben7799 5y ago
  You've been able to disable this behavior since like a month after the iPhone 13/13 Pro came out. It's the auto-macro functionality in the camera settings. The default behavior switches to the ultra-wide below the minimum focus distance of the other two cameras.

spyspy 5y ago

I did the same for my honeymoon last fall. I hate carrying around a "full size" camera because 1) it's bulky and heavy and expensive so I have to worry about it constantly and 2) it makes me look like your standard tourist. Pocket. 13. Snap. Snap. Pocket. Go. Happy wife. Airdrop her the photos next time we sit down for food for upload to instagram.

tomduncalf 5y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure I'll go back to using a full size camera except for situations which call for a specialist lens (e.g. going on safari, maybe astrophotography one day). I think for me the killer feature is that the photos are there on your phone (and in the cloud), ready to be browsed/shared/edited. I'm terrible for never getting round to downloading/editing the photos from an SD card!
- spyspy 5y ago
  My Sony a6500 has been relegated to webcam duties.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    Honestly, I just carry my a6300 with me most of the time. I’ve used some of the modded apps that are available (it’s running android after all) to ensure I can single-click pair it to my phone and send all photos over, or send photos over automatically as soon as they’re taken. It’s just as convenient for quick sharing, and the photos are so much better.
    - sujinge9 5y ago
      Can you share what apps are? I'm highly interested. Main reason my a6000 is gathering dust is because saving to Google Photos is a pain.
      - kuschku 5y ago
        There's a ftp uploader that's publicly available, but mostly I just wrote my own custom upload tool. Search for OpenMemories Framework, there's something of an unofficial SDK available.