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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 3

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.
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  As far as I know you can’t prevent it from switching to 1x image digitally zoomed when shooting at 3x though, unless you use a third party app

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.

tomduncalf 5y ago
As far as I know you can’t prevent it from switching to 1x image digitally zoomed when shooting at 3x though, unless you use a third party app