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A Surprising Tap
20 October 2025
We love this shot, the finger poised, the light of the screen illuminating it. Joyce was going through something on her phone at the end of a long day in which she had a routine debridement of her leg wound, which involved a lot of walking, a trip in the car, navigating the medical building (and two elevators) with a lot of thank-you's to helpful and considerate people we had never met before.
A Tap. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max back camera at 15.7mm, f2.8, 1/59 second and ISO 2500 captured with Adobe Indigo and processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
You never know about people. Sometimes the way they surprise you can actually delight you.
We also never know what the camera settings are for an iPhone shot.
Except we know the f-stop will be wide open and it won't matter. But when we noticed the settings for this shot, we pointed out to ourselves that ISO 2500 is not something any of our early-2000s cameras can reach.
That's not a big deal for today's mirrorless and dSLR cameras but getting beyond 400 with film was dangerous territory (oh, the grain!). And the idea of shooting digital at 1600 (oh, the grain!) always made us uncomfortable.
You were, in the early digital era, sacrificing dynamic range. And it was obvious too.
But blind to camera settings, we tap away fearlessly on our phone screen's shutter button these days.
And even at ISO 2500, we can be surprised (but still delighted) at what we've captured.