June 26, 2016

I’m Impressed by iPhone Photography

2 minute read


My wife and I got back from our honeymoon in Italy a few weeks ago (which you can read about here), and I need to remark on how impressed I am by the performance our iPhones. Both my wife’s iPhone 5S and my iPhone 6 performed spectacularly, taking hundreds of photos for us during our ten days on holiday.

I know there’s a lot of marketing hype about how good the iPhone camera is, but this was my first time relying exclusively upon a smartphone camera for pictures of a momentous chapter of my life, and I now buy the hype. The iPhone really punches above its weight class in terms of performance and cost efficiency. Because we were using smartphones, we were also able to rely on Google Photos seamlessly backing up full quality copies of our photos every night, to ensure we didn’t lose any photos while we were trekking around.

There were only two things that I think could possibly be found wanting in our photos, from an absolute standpoint:

  1. The cameras don’t the ability to limit depth of field, which limits the ability to get good bokeh
  2. The small camera sensor limits how well the camera can resolve dynamic ranges and low-light shots (although HDR does help quite a bit with the former)

In every other category, the iPhone was strictly superior to carrying around a bulky camera. It has excellent postprocessing capabilities, brilliantly fast shutter speed, has a selfie camera for my wife, and is eminently more portable than any other camera. I honestly would consider doing this on future holidays.

© Jeff Rabinowitz, 2023