A big 35mm lens and no software effects makes a big difference!
I think I’m the only person in the world who considers the iPhone camera to be Barbie-tier, a neat toy for little girls but not a serious tool for serious photographers. I know a lot of people would disagree with me on this, and that’s fine.
Not that I’m a serious photographer, but I do appreciate raw images, big images in terms of file size, images that can be enhanced to my taste with tools of my choosing, images that can be printed in a decent size with a decent quality output. (To be honest, most phone cameras nowadays do produce images that look good in print up to a certain size.)
You’ll never see a “real” photo shoot of any kind done with a phone camera. I work in a design-oriented business that does a lot of shoots; we hire a pro with real gear, not Timmy from Marketing with his Samsung Galaxy 27.
You’ll never see a serious birder trying to get good shots of rare warbler with a phone; in fact, such people will have ridiculously expensive lenses to capture such thrilling moments.
The thing that drives me nuts about phone cameras is the automatic enhancement. It’s OK for snapshots and lazy social media sharing, I guess. With Apple, in particular, there is not even a setting (that I can find) that allows you to take raw images. You can save them as compressed .jpgs or whatever that stupid Apple format is that can only be seen on a little iPhone screen, you know, the one where you can play it for a second or put your finger on it to make it glow. Again, it’s a neat little toy for Barbie, but nobody will ever produce classic work with that format, whatever it’s called. I’m not even going to do it the justice of Googling it.
A 35mm lens lets in more light — period. It’s pretty basic physics so I dusted off my trusty Canon EOS and took a few shots the other day. The light was not ideal, kind of dull for here, but I was going for deep blacks. My own eyes were fascinated by the mirroring effect of the wet black sand when people were walking on it with the last gasps of surf lapping at their ankles. I think the camera captured it pretty well.
One thing I was NOT expecting was to capture the “vibe” so well, the peace and joy one feels in such moments. In some cases, the shots were completely candid; in others, I asked people if they would mind being in my shot.
ZERO modification was done to these images. This is exactly how they downloaded from the camera’s SD card. Because of that, the images are very large and might take a while to load so thanks for your patience. Feel free to right click, save, and zoom in. All I ask is that if you use these images or make derivative works, you let me know and cut me in if it’s for commercial purposes.
In any case, I hope you enjoy them!
