Digital camera slap fight

I’ve been fighting with my cameras and it’s pretty much devolved to a slap fight between my iPhone 6s + and my Nikon Digital SLR. I love them both dearly but I always have my iPhone in my pocket. Always. I rarely carry my big arse DSLR with my fat 16 to 35 f/2.8 unless I’m going out to “shoot”. But lately, I’ve been totally enamored with the Zeiss lenses I have for my iPhone and they have substantially changed the way I look at making images. Just about any time I go for a walk my wide angle Zeiss lens is attached to the phone, and the Zoom lens is in my pocket ready to go. I find that I can take and edit images on my phone or iPad using Photoshop Fix or Lightroom to make high quality shots on my mobile devices. No, the resolution doesn’t rival that of my DSLR, especially since I shoot in RAW mode always. But they are good, I mean really good.

This image of the Toyota is a good example. The pixels are tight and not noisy even though it’s a crop, and the color and detail are very crisp. There’s not a lot to complain about since I don’t intend on making prints and selling them from my iPhone. It was shot with the Zeiss wide angle lens attached. The lens has almost zero edge falloff or distortion or vignette. The Zoom lens is solid, although much harder to take a stable sharp image, it’s a wonderful piece of glass, which is exactly what I would expect from a Carl Zeiss lens, right? Still, it’s just an image from my phone. That really sounds degrading when I think about it, my iPhone deserves more credit.

If they keep going the way they are, soon the phone market will soon eclipse the need for a point and shoot camera. The only thing that is really missing is a built-in zoom lens, and no, not digital zoom – optical zoom only please. Some new technologies using liquid lenses look promising, as does the iPhone 7 plus’ dual lens system. Fortunately for my Nikon I love wide angle shots. Can’t get enough of them in fact, wide angle rules all the things, and my lenses suit those needs far better than my iPhone can.

It’s going to continue to be a fight though, I just feel it. I just about never go on a hike without either my Nikon and lens assortment or my Full-frame Fuji T1000, but the Fuji is a fixed lens so it’s got its own challenges at times, but besides that, it’s a wonderful camera. Since I don’t see a camera phone ever being equal to the quality of a full-frame camera, it will just have to be a choice as to what I’m willing to haul around with me. I’m perfectly willing to lug gear around, especially since I have multiple medium and large format cameras that shoot film (gasp!) so it will still be a trip by trip choice for me with the higher resolution camera winning out, with the large and medium format film still winning over digital – but that’s a whole other discussion.

%d bloggers like this: