A bit of blather on mobile digital photography.

Categories: artwork, and-another-thing, photos

Tags: iphoneography, autostitch, You Gotta See This, Phoneography, Boinx, Pylon, iPhone 5S, Samsung Galaxy GS4

Date: 31 January 2014 08:03:38

I've just swapped from a Samsung Galaxy S4 to an iPhone 5S and for one reason only. The camera.

(The Devils Giraffe, iPhone 4S + Autostitch. Blogged about here: http://kercal.wibsite.com/2013/10/13/paris/)

To be fair the GS4 is a great phone. The screen is very good, I appreciate the larger viewing size too, I loved the flip cover allowing me to see the time and certain information without accessing the main features of the device and so on. It rarely stuttered at the pictures I was drawing, even with Photoshop Touch which at times (hallo large size - semi transparent brush) is known to stop and think.

But the camera. No. Just no. Didn't work for me. Slow, cumbersome, occasionally great shots but far more frequent missed or blurry ones. I was heartened at one point to find an app I love to bits - Autostitch - on Android and they saddened to see how clumsy it was in comparison to the Apple phones camera and ecosystem. Honestly - I'm not a fanboy for any company... My favourite tablet at the moment is a Surface Pro or a Tesco Hudl and my favourite phone would be a Samsung GS4 with an S Pen running something closer to iOS or Metro.

That said when Apple get it right - oh boy they do. The industrial design (can Sir Jony really only be knighted once?) is second to none (although again, the Surface is a very well designed tablet and arguably iOS 7 owes a good few nods to Metro) and the iOS app store ecosystem remains a league ahead.

Now I'm back on iOS devices I waddled through the mud to get to a place I'm fond of photographing: an electricity pylon slap bang in a field. That said anything geometrically repetitive makes me want to whip out the panorama apps (see the Eiffel Tower at the beginning of the blog post) but the pylon, so far, has been good to me*.

Last year I photographed it on iPhone 4S:and yesterday I photographed it on iPhone 5S:The clarity and definition on the 5S is obviously exactly what I was hoping to see. The lack of colour is down to Global Weirding rather than the lens. I look forward to popping back and snapping away when it's sunny.

Like a complete nitwit (I left the house in a bit of a hurry to get photographing) I forgot my Ollocip but this was Olloclip on 4S and I'll post a comparison pic when able later:(update: Olloclip pic taken with 5S:I also photographed the pylon using Boinx' lovely You Gotta See This app...

4S:

5S:Less of a noticeable difference, if any, but I suspect that the app drops the resolution down to a set amount in order to capture the pictures it does. I'd love to see an update to it to take into account the faster processing speed and better lens though.

*Obviously I'm cautious around electricity and metal and so on, and I certainly don't advise anyone to do this. Generally I let people know where I'm going to be or go with a friend. Apart from standing near to the pylon I don't do anything that silly or dangerous and hope that nobody sees this as something to copy in anything other than sensible ways, if at all.