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Friday Slide Show: Ornaments
22 December 2023
New tree, same ornaments. But a different camera. We were interested to see how the iPhone 15 Pro Max would do on what has always been a tough assignment.
To jump to the conclusion, we're pleased with the results. To skip back to the beginning, it wasn't easy.
The big problem we had using the iPhone was composing the shots.
Rather than poking the barrel of a lens into the tree to line up a shot, you are working with a small board. And that board has a set of lenses in the corner. And you are often not quite sure when Macro kicks in or which lens is active.
The big problem we had using the iPhone was composing the shots.
So as you carefully line up a shot the whole scene may shift out of view.
The view, on that big screen, is terrific, though. We've shot with some very small LCDs (like the one on the the original Nikon Coolpix). So having a screen the size of our hand was really nice.
But because we were mostly working in Macro mode, it was still very hard to stabilize the camera. We were surprised these shots didn't all suffer from camera movement. The image was jumping all over the screen so much it felt more like sports photography than macro photography.
It didn't help that we had to move one finger to the shutter to finally take the shot, either.
These were taken in the late afternoon so there was some room light in addition to the tree lights. That made it easier for the iPhone to focus automatically.
When we pulled the HEIC images into Lightroom, we tried our default edits for our older cameras and compared that to the Auto option. Neither persuaded us. So we tweaked an initial image and synched those edits. Lightroom makes it exceptionally easy to play that game.
To return to our conclusion, we're pleased with the results.
