Each year, Travel Photographer in Stein Mann shares an in-depth look at the latest iPhone camera updates. This year, Mann has put the iPhone 12 Pro for testing at Montana’s Glacier National Park, introducing a triple-lens camera and leader sensor in bright and sunny to dark and snowy conditions.
The first thing to note here is that the iPhone 12 Pro’s camera upgrades are primarily powered by software upgrades, along with a lidar scanner. The iPhone 12 Pro Max gets a significantly larger wide camera camera sensor, but it’s not yet available for testing.
Mann adds that the addition of night mode support for ultra wide sensors is the biggest change this year:
I love super wide shooting with any camera, so I was stunned when the iPhone 11 Pro introduced the Ultra Wide Lens last year. While I really love the perspective, I noticed that the quality of the Ultra Wide was not up to my standards when shooting in moderate to low light conditions, so I only used the Ultra Wide in bright, daylight conditions.
Elsewhere, Locked doesn’t appreciate exposure exposure adjustment, which means the exposure adjustment doesn’t return to auto to mode whenever a picture is captured:
An example of perfect use for something like this is shooting in the snow. In most camera scenes their self based on the average of the light. Determines exposure, which means that if you have a ton of bright light in your frame (such as from ice), the meter will average this and make the bright parts more gray by default. To compensate for this, most photographers adjust their contact from 1 to 2 stops to get closer to the true white in the frame.
Speaking of the leader scanner, Mann says that he used the portrait mode with night mode to get the following portrait, and the leader helped to lock the subject.
As you can imagine, with this shaky setup there were definitely some camera shakes and movements but thanks to a little night mode computational wizardry, better OIS, faster ISO and of course Leader, Esther is still sharp and surprisingly color accurate.
The leader did a great job here – I realized I never messed up with the attention she had on her face the whole time. Also, creating an accurate depth map around the furry hood seems like it would be really complicated, but the iPhone 12 Pro has done a great job.
Finally, Mann says that if you’re serious about iPhone photography, you should look forward to the full iPhone 12 Pro Max next month:
The iPhone 12 Pro is a solid camera, and thanks to a bunch of new digital opportunities I found it a bit stronger than the already great iPhone 11 Pro – but if you’re serious about doing photography with your iPhone, wait for the iPhone 12 Pro to the maximum. That seems like the most significant leap in the iPhone camera hardware we’ve experienced in years, and it’s only three weeks left.
As always, the complete breakdown of honor is worth reading and can be found here on her blog. The review includes some tips and tricks for iPhone photographers, wishes for future iPhone camera hardware and more.
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