My take on smartphone photography

My take on smartphone photography

Up to now I wasn't great fan of smartphone photography (in fact I avoided it as much as I could) as I was pretty sure the results would be of poor quality, blurry, with low dynamic range, noisy. And with my previous phone they definitely were. But this might change as I recently discovered that my Samsung S5 has quite a capable camera. Apart from using my mighty DSLR, in Thailand I took a looot of smartphone photos. A few of them left me really impressed by what those modern smartphones can do. Dynamic range is quite good, sharpness is very good and colours rendition is very natural. Even in low-light it worked quite well most of the time. There is quite a lot of noise but I still found the photos perfectly acceptable. The only thing I miss on Samsung S5 are manual exposure controls as the only setting I can change is ISO and exposure bias. I cannot set exposure time nor aperture to what I want. RAWs would be nice too but I can live without them (and they would eat phone's memory pretty quickly I guess).

All that is really impressive. I recently read an article on PetaPixel which seems to explain why smartphone cameras are that good nowadays - it seems that 92% of phone users take photos with their smartphones and 36% find quality of camera to be key to decision of buying a phone! So many phone users actually think of their smartphones as cameras. For many it is probably the only camera they have.

I will start to think that way too probably because I don't carry my DSLR camera with me all the time, but I do carry my phone so it's good to know I have powerful camera in my pocket whenever I need it.

Here's a little example. Below panorama was shot and stacked on my smartphone. It isn't perfect but still looks quite nice. And it was created pretty much automatically. In Lightroom I just increased vibrance and contrast a little bit as I found the results a little bit too flat for my liking.

Daily photo - Railay beach at Sunset

When I had been initially planning my Thailand trip a few months ago I intended to spent whole 2 weeks in one place - on Railay peninsula in Krabi province - which is photographer's paradise. But then I read that this place is becoming really boring after more than 2 - 3 days, that there is nothing you can do while being there. And I trusted those opinions and altered my plan (not that I regret as I visited another fantastic place). Lesson learnt: don't believe in opinions of non-photographers.

Generally speaking this place is amazing and even after 8 days there I could find something new to do. I did a lot of swimming, some kayaking, I went on a few trips to nearby islands and spent some time trying local cuisine. If I would had stayed longer I would probably give rock climbing a try (BTW if you're climbing there are a few nice vantage points on Railay peninsula from which you could take some amazing photos). And yeah, this place is just amazing for landscape photography as you could already see from some of my other posts like this or this. Sunsets look really beautiful when you have such amazing cliffs in a foreground (or background depending how you compose your shots).

Here's another photo from Railay, taken during sunset. The place was rather busy at that day so there are a few people in the frame but anyway :)

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Lanzarote - Land of Volcanoes

Daily photo - Lanzarote - Land of Volcanoes

Today I would like to share panorama photo I took more than 2 years ago on island of Lanzarote (Canary Islands). Below panorama shows Timanfaya National Park, located in southern part of the island. Many of the volcanoes in the park are still active, despite last big eruptions took place in 19th century, and in fact whole park is very geologically active. Due to this activity just a few centimeters under the ground temperature reaches 100 °C. And at about 10 meters it's already 600 degrees! Walking there is like walking on a ticking bomb. But the views are extraordinary!

After reading above you shouldn't be surprised to learn that alternative name of the park is Fire Mountains (Montañas del Fuego).

 

BTW make sure to click on the photo to view it in large size as it looks much better this way!

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Cenote in Mexico

Daily photo - Cenote in Mexico

Today I would like to share this HDR panorama taken in one of the cenotes in Mexico. I already shared one version of this image in the past... but I like this one a big more.

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Panorama of Warsaw

Daily photo - Panorama of Warsaw

Today I would like to share HDR panorama from Warsaw, Poland.

Original panorama is very wide and has almost 200 megapixels but unfortunately I had to crop it on the sides to make it look better on my blog. Otherwise it didn't look nice here. I also recommend viewing it in large by clicking on the image below.

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Gorgeous Sunset in Warsaw

Daily photo - Gorgeous Sunset in Warsaw

For a few days this week I had been planning some sunset photography in my home town but everyday it was raining and there was no sunset at all - just some boring ugly grey clouds covering whole sky and terribly flat light. But yesterday despite it was raining almost whole day just an hour before sunset the weather changed. I saw sky finally! There was hope! So I packed my gear and went to the Vistula river bank and waited for the sunset. And there it was with some amazing reds, blues and purples. It was really worth the wait!

And today the sun is shining since morning so hopefully there will be another gorgeous sunset. Yes, hopefully.

For below photo I decided to take a HDR panoramic photo to show almost whole sky. I also decided to close the frame on both sides using a bridge on one side and river bank on the other. This resulted in a nice panorama with 2:1 aspect ratio.

If you're interested in learning more about HDR photography, make sure to read my free HDR tutorial eBook.

BTW it was the first photoshoot I did with my 'regular gear' after testing my Sony NEX-6. And you know what - dimensions and weight of my Canon 5D MK III are now difficult to accept :) it's so heavy! But I can at least take a lot of shots with it on a single battery ;)

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Beach at Night

Astrophotography - where Sony NEX-6 is not enough

As you could read in my review just a few days ago, Sony NEX-6 camera is a really great mirrorless camera that can be used in many cases instead of much heavier DSLR. Where it didn't work for me, however, is astrophotography. Or I should rather say landscape photography featuring night sky as astrophotography is something much more complex that usually involves photographing distant galaxies and stars.

The noise produced by NEX-6 sensor, which is rather low, is still too high in most cases - at least for me. Also I don't own any good and fast prime wide angle lens for NEX system at the moment, and quite frankly I don't intend to buy one (as my primary system is still Canon). And even if I did, I'm not sure if that lens could beat my excellent Canon f/1.4 L II. Which I really love for images it produces.

And as you can see here I really like this kind of photos. Stars make the images look surreal or out of this world.

Daily photo - Beach at Night

Despite what I said in the paragraphs above I still made some attempts in capturing night sky while I was in Mexico. I had to, as the sky there was absolutely gorgeous with thousands of stars (I don't remember seeing such clear sky in a long while). I was about 100km from Cancun where number of hotels was much lower so there wasn't that much of light pollution.

And today photo shows one of these attempts. It is a bit similar in concept to one of my other photos, Have a rest under the sky which I took in 2012 on Fuerteventura island. I just regret that I wasn't able to capture more stars in below image. Maybe next time.

BTW if you would like to learn more about star photography, make sure to read my free tutorial.

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Welcome to the Underworld

Cenotes

Cenotes is an underground river system which is pretty unique to Mexico. It consists of about 8000 natural sinkholes which are believed to be connected to each other thus making one huge underground river (as far as I know there is no proof for that so far). As cenotes (which are sinkoles) were created as a result of collapsing of lime bedrock you can imagine that water in the cenotes is crystal clear (lime is not very friendly for animals and plants), that's why they are Holy Grail of scuba and cave divers from all over the world.

A cenote can be open (no "roof" about the pit), semi-open - there is roof but with a whole in it and they can be also completely closed (cavern). Bear in mind it's not official classification.

Also some of the cenotes were important for the ancient Mayas for sacrificial offerings. Others were important played important part in their beliefs and mythology, eg. they believed that one of the cenotes didn't have bottom (it probably was some kind of a portal to the underworld). A few years ago Polish diving expedition tried to prove this theory wrong but they didn't make to the bottom. So this legend can still be true.

Daily photo - Welcome to the Underworld

Today daily photo shows panorama of one of the cenotes (no surprise there, eh?) - the biggest one in Mexico which is available for tourists (about 7000 out of 8000 aren't available publicly). It was semi-open one, meaning that there is a "roof" but there is a hole in it. Now this hole made taking this photo a real nightmare. Light entering through it was very bright while the rest of the scene was almost completely black. It goes without saying that dynamic range of this scene was huge. Extreme. I took 11 exposures at 1 EV spacing but in fact I should take even more as with this approach some highlights were still blown out. However, I decided to not restore all the highlights because this way the image looked rather unnatural.

To create this photo I had to manually blend more than 50 photos. It took a while and was a really difficult (and also a good exercise in manual blending ;) ) due to the fact that neither my computer nor Photoshop liked file that big. Occasional crashes and hangs didn't stop me, however, and after about 10 hours of blending and a few more hours of post-processing you can see final image :)

I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do (and I really like it!).

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