Cruz N Car Show September 2019

Posted on by Ian C.

Time for another car show, downtown Winter Garden … new this time I’m using my brand new iPhone 11 Pro Max; it gave me some great photos, though the new “ultra-wide” (0.5x”) lens is going to take a bit of getting used to – it’s great sometimes to take a really wide view from close to the action, but sometimes the result looks strange even though the phone is doing impressive work to eliminate distortion. Take a look at the station wagon, for where the wide view doesn’t quite work:

Close-up of the VW Beetle paintwork

Zoomed Owls

Posted on by Ian C.

I’ve been taking quite a few pictures of the Great Horned Owl nest behind our home, but I can only do that because of the camera I own. As a comparison today, I took photos with my iPhone 7 Plus, my older high zoom Sony DSC-HX400V, and my current high zoom Nikon Coolpix P900. With each camera I took an unzoomed photo and a fully zoomed one – and I also cropped as close as possible to the nest for a closest view …

 

The iPhone was a 2x zoom lens, and “digital zoom” that claims as much as 10x – the horrible results are a strong indication to NEVER use that feature:

 

The Sony has a 60x zoom lens and takes very good photos; it’s also a lot lighter than the Nikon:

 

The Nikon has the highest zoom at 83x and is the camera I bought for and took to Africa for our safari last year – but at the highest zoom levels it’s hard to use without a tripod. Nevertheless if you need maximum zoom, it’s a great performer for the price! The fully cropped image still has resolution more than the normal 1500x that I use for web photos (as you see if you view the full size image):

 

From this comparison, it’s clear that iPhone is still useless for high zoom images, but that the Sony is generally just as good as the Nikon; if you can find the Sony, it’s a great buy!

Chloe with depth

Posted on by Ian C.

Checking out the newly rebuilt website I noticed that I’ve not posted any pictures of Chloe for more than two years (I blame Facebook, I just post quick pics there instead of here!); so let’s fix that with this photo I took this afternoon, using the “depth” / portrait feature of iPhone 7 Plus (it blurs the background to make the main subject stand out more):

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