Using phone camera

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 border=I wrote earlier about my favourite camera apps for iPhone. Currently, I am experimenting with my new iPhone 6 plus, which has a much improved camera, compared to an iPhone 5. To me, the main appeal of the phone camera is that I always have it with me. Of course, despite all the impressive improvements, a phone came is not a DSLR. In order to avoid disappointment, it is important to understand what it can and cannot do. There are many resources for learning this, both online and in print. The book on the right is a good example.

For example, the iPhone camera is excellent for macro shots. It also works amazingly well for shooting well-lit scenes, like the shot in an indoor butterfly garden above. However, the low light performance is quite poor. In other words, the images taken in low light have a lot of noise.

In some cases, noise is quite acceptable. This is true for sports images, for example, although a phone camera would a very poor choice for sports, because of the short focal length of the lens.

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I took a couple of photos with my iPhone during an early morning hike up Mt. Doug, when it was still dark. It was very foggy and dark, so I new the images would be very noisy. Instead of fighting the noise, I tried to use it to create an artistic effect. After returning home, I brought the photos from my iCloud into Lightroom. The photo of the gnarly tree above had almost no colour in it to begin with, so I slightly increased the contrast and converted it to black-and-white using Nick’s Silver FX plug-in. I used the “Fine Art process” preset, which increases local contrast and brings out small details. I wanted to preserve the noise pattern, because I thought it looked like the surface of a watercolour paper.

The photo of the signal light in the fog (below) reminded me of the Impressionists‘ paintings, so I wanted to play with it’s colours to create an image in that style. In Lightroom, I bumped up noise reduction sliders (both luminance and colour) to very high values, around 50. Of course, this results in significant loss os sharpness and detail, but just like the Impressionists, I was not concerned with these kinds of things. I also increased the saturation of the Blue, Red and Purple colour channels almost to the maximum.

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