You are claiming that this is artificially broken because the background is out of focus. The rest of the world recognise that the background is itself noise and blurring it out prevents it from ruining the picture of the girl and her bubbles.
But hell, you've shown your ignorance or hypocrisy already by suggesting this falls short of Renaissance artistry: I dont see any fucking detail in behind the portrait of Lisa Gherardini; I guess you must be unfamiliar with that particular painting.
I believe (haven't used it to test) that the L16 captures an image through all 9 active lenses at once, and uses the minute variances in angle to stitch together a higher resolution image.
Early reviews suggest decent glass still wins, which isn't a surprise, but this is shiny new technology and an interesting challenge to 'you must have a big lens to get lots of light'.
When talking dynamic range a DSLR will blow any cell phone camera out of the water. If you really want impressive dynamic range use film
Agree entirely, and I also like shooting straight into the sun.
My point wasn't on the sensor range, it was the built-in software's ability to set the exposure to maximise detail given the discrepancy between the scene's dynamic range and the sensor's ability to capture it.
My phone is genuinely good at judging that exposure.
It doesn't hurt that my camera is all manual
I can use my phone on all manual too, but it's much quicker and easier with the camera. I'm lazy, I take most shots on 'program' mode and for challenging (high dynamic range, dimly lit or fast moving) scenes bracket and/or shoot manual.
Colour accuracy in digital photography is a software thing. If your phone can only capture JPGs then it's important, but people prefer warmer skin tones so most JPG engines intentionally skew the white balance anyway. On my non-phone cameras I shoot RAW, I can adjust colour balance in post.
Most of the rest make no difference on a photograph three inches wide displayed on someone's shitty screen inside Facebook. So it's not just that the phone camera is good enough, it's that people can't even tell the difference anyway. The objective measures aren't actually relevant to a lot of people, and the subjective measures ("How good does Auntie Janet look in my pictures?") carry far greater weight.
The post-processing is very material in that subjective measure.
Depth of field is some artsy-fartsy garbage like black-white instead of color. In video games [...]
In photography it's used to create a specific image. You can have the whole shot in focus - great for landscapes - or really narrow the depth of field and only have the subject in focus - often used in portraits, but really valuable in things like nature photography where the subject may otherwise be hard to pick out from the background.
Let the viewers decide for themselves what details in the photograph is important to them.
No. I'm the photographer, I'm creating an image that I find aesthetically pleasing. You can like it or fuck off, and I'm not terribly fussed which.
What counts is the picture quality, the light sensitivity of the sensor combined with its resistance to optical noise (common problem with smaller CCDs).
Some photographers intentionally introduce noise. Or on film, grain. This changes the aesthetic, often for the worse but sometimes improving it.
Honestly this argument that DoF contributes to the quality reminds me of the same bogus about tube-amplifier having a "warmer" sound. This ignores that the warmness is actually just a distortion (i.e. an error) that sounds pleasant. An amplifier should reproduce the input signal as accurate as possible. Distorting it is then the job of the equalizer.
The sensor does its absolute best to capture exactly the light hitting it. So job done, to the limits of the technology.
As the photographer I configure the lens to change the light hitting the sensor. The sensor never sees an unblurred background if I choose not to allow it, and so the resultant image has a blurred background.
I may then decide there's too much sensor noise and smooth the image slightly, or convert to black and white because it better suits the subject or hides a distracting colour.
The equalizer equivalent is your monitor. You can change its brightness, alter its colour spectrum and turn it off. I still have control over the photograph and what I included in it, just as a musician chooses which sounds to include in their published works.
most of your professional photographers spend a lot of time in studio shooting stuff. Coffee cups, t-shirts, gold-tipped cables, knick-knacks. That's a good bread-and-butter gig. An iPhone would be fantastic for that, and really is preferable to a big DLSR because you don't need the huge support tripods and you can sync it up to external flashes and all sorts of monitors
Sorry, but no. If you're in a studio you're controlling everything, including the image quality, and a camera phone just isn't going to do it.
The tripods are always there, so you don't tote them with you. The lights all work with your camera. The monitors all work with your camera. You're at peak photographer.
I know at least one professional commercial photog who has a dedicated phone just for running out endless product shots for customers
That's nice for him. For website photographs, or sharing previews of the final shot, for snap & run engagements, that may well be all that's needed. But in the studio, by the time you've added proper lighting, including the background, framed your shot, done any desired post-processing.. it's actually quicker to use a proper camera.
I can disable it and use a fully electronic shutter, but I don't have to. I get faster flash sync speeds with the mechanical shutter, and it's better for shooting fast moving objects.
Restaurants should put up a sign saying "for the privacy and courtesy of our customers, no pictures are allowed." And cities should pass bylaws allowing for confiscation of the phone and a fine in such cases.
Why confiscate their phone if they're taking a photograph with their camera?
If you really care about great photography, you're not taking pictures of your meals in restaurants.
Even great photographers take snapshots, but also: What's stopping you taking a great photograph of the excellent meal you're about to enjoy?
something my Canon and its 12x Optical Zoom can handle with ease
12x what exactly? Do you even know what you're talking about?
Depending whether you mean the 120SX (10 Megapixels, 10x zoom) or the 130SX (12.1 Megapixels, 12x zoom) you had a telephoto lens equivalent to a 360 or 336mm. Sure, a mobile phone can't match that - but your camera can't match the wide angle shots a mobile can capture either.
Anyone who thinks the camera in an iPhone, a Galaxy or any other mobile device is capable of doing all the things that even a fairly inexpensive point-and-shoot is capable of doing.
My phone can take pictures my $3k camera can't, mainly because I'll have my phone with me and frequently don't have my camera bag, camera and lenses with me.
Sure, it doesn't offer all the capabilities and control I can get through the more dedicated kit I own, but it's already surpassed the abilities of two inexpensive point & shoot cameras I also still own.
I agree that there's still a massive gap between good dedicated cameras and what's built into phones, but low-end camera sales have collapsed for very good reason.
The challenge with tools like that is that they focus on sensor+lens+jpeg engine quality, and tend to disregard the additional software that can supplement those.
If Apple have invested significantly in identifying that a picture is a portrait, softening the background, sharpening the eyebrows and concealing spots on the face, that makes it easier to take portraits of that type with their phone. The test image is going to struggle to demonstrate this.
(Personally I prefer to shoot RAW and post-process myself. But I like turning portraits black and white, adding a little contrast, accentuating specific hues to really bring out the character in a face. I could do all of that on my phone rather than in Lightroom filters, but why constrain myself to such limited options and a small screen.)
It's similarly going to struggle with how well the software detects a scene with high dynamic range and appropriately chooses automatic settings that really draw out the picture. My S7 is bloody excellent at that - easily matching my "professional" camera.
So really you need a range of tests for a camera, and unless you have every camera you're comparing with you at the time (and even then) it's very hard to properly assess objectively just how good a complete camera package is.
Lens MTF charts are informative, but far from adequate..
No amount of talent in the world can get good shots out of bad cameras.
That's nonsense. You may not get the range of good shots, and you may need to work much harder to get them, but you can get excellent photos out of any modern digital or film camera.
I've worked in open plan offices my entire career. They're normal in the UK. We don't understand the US pre-occupation with closing off all social interaction.
There's another cultural difference: We're not self-centred arseholes that have to talk about themselves all day. Teach your Sales/Marketing/Communications colleagues not to be inconsiderate cunts and you'll find the working environment improves immensely.
Hmm. To be fair to Apple if you gave people the free half of the OS they'd burst into tears and ask why their computer doesn't work.
Most people don't know Android uses a Linux kernel or that their ATM runs Windows. I don't see many websites telling you the set of Apache Foundation projects they draw together, or which hardware they're deployed on.
Meanwhile adverts appear inside streaming video that doesn't reach me through HTTP, inside radio streams that aren't HTTP, through online games that don't go anywhere near a web browser.
Or there's my internet enabled TV that throws adverts at me if I try and access any online service. Perhaps you've encountered advertising in your mobile apps? You think Google/Apple/Microsoft aren't tracking everything their users are doing, whether it's on the web or not?
Right here on slashdot. Welp, that sure makes a point.
That's strange. You appear to be a sexist racist piece of shit.
Here's a fucking clue: White males are the only people in my country that it's legal to discriminate against on both race and gender grounds. Despite this, poor white males also attain the worse educational outcomes in the country.
Tell me how I abandon this fucking privilege, please.
I neither know nor care. Fuck 'em, I'm not paying for that advertising anyway. I'm just highlighting that they're misreading the demographics to which they're targeting their advertising spend.
Demand that any electronic voting machine survive two days taking votes on something important (e.g. M&Ms vs Skittles) at DefCon before it can be used in an election.
Given how many adverts for Pampers nappies I see, especially as a proportion of total adverts I see, I think P&G need to get accurate, not creative.
I don't have a small human, I have no intention of having a small human and I don't buy nappies for my friends. Pampers wont fit me and I don't own a 1961 Ferrari 250GT California Spider so I'm really struggling to see how P&G expect a return on that particular advertising spend.
I opted for a beard. Quick trim once a week, operating costs close to zero and the beard trimmer is useful for eyebrows and tidying up the back of the head too so even the capex isn't fully incurred by the beard.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I confirm that you don't have a clue.
Look at this photograph:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-R0q...
You are claiming that this is artificially broken because the background is out of focus. The rest of the world recognise that the background is itself noise and blurring it out prevents it from ruining the picture of the girl and her bubbles.
But hell, you've shown your ignorance or hypocrisy already by suggesting this falls short of Renaissance artistry: I dont see any fucking detail in behind the portrait of Lisa Gherardini; I guess you must be unfamiliar with that particular painting.
The one in which his character has his own office?
Good question.
I believe (haven't used it to test) that the L16 captures an image through all 9 active lenses at once, and uses the minute variances in angle to stitch together a higher resolution image.
Early reviews suggest decent glass still wins, which isn't a surprise, but this is shiny new technology and an interesting challenge to 'you must have a big lens to get lots of light'.
To put an ultra-fine point on this, there is a name for saying the "aesthetic quality of the background blur" has a name: BULLSHIT.
You're telling me the blurred background on these two images has the same aesthetic quality?
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
https://i0.wp.com/digital-phot...
That's not a fucking filter.
When talking dynamic range a DSLR will blow any cell phone camera out of the water. If you really want impressive dynamic range use film
Agree entirely, and I also like shooting straight into the sun.
My point wasn't on the sensor range, it was the built-in software's ability to set the exposure to maximise detail given the discrepancy between the scene's dynamic range and the sensor's ability to capture it.
My phone is genuinely good at judging that exposure.
It doesn't hurt that my camera is all manual
I can use my phone on all manual too, but it's much quicker and easier with the camera. I'm lazy, I take most shots on 'program' mode and for challenging (high dynamic range, dimly lit or fast moving) scenes bracket and/or shoot manual.
Dynamic range, vertical line resolution, horizontal line resolution, noise, moiré, color accuracy, etc. are all measurable when using that chart
Colour accuracy in digital photography is a software thing. If your phone can only capture JPGs then it's important, but people prefer warmer skin tones so most JPG engines intentionally skew the white balance anyway. On my non-phone cameras I shoot RAW, I can adjust colour balance in post.
Most of the rest make no difference on a photograph three inches wide displayed on someone's shitty screen inside Facebook. So it's not just that the phone camera is good enough, it's that people can't even tell the difference anyway. The objective measures aren't actually relevant to a lot of people, and the subjective measures ("How good does Auntie Janet look in my pictures?") carry far greater weight.
The post-processing is very material in that subjective measure.
Depth of field is some artsy-fartsy garbage like black-white instead of color.
In video games [...]
In photography it's used to create a specific image. You can have the whole shot in focus - great for landscapes - or really narrow the depth of field and only have the subject in focus - often used in portraits, but really valuable in things like nature photography where the subject may otherwise be hard to pick out from the background.
Let the viewers decide for themselves what details in the photograph is important to them.
No. I'm the photographer, I'm creating an image that I find aesthetically pleasing. You can like it or fuck off, and I'm not terribly fussed which.
What counts is the picture quality, the light sensitivity of the sensor combined with its resistance to optical noise (common problem with smaller CCDs).
Some photographers intentionally introduce noise. Or on film, grain. This changes the aesthetic, often for the worse but sometimes improving it.
Honestly this argument that DoF contributes to the quality reminds me of the same bogus about tube-amplifier having a "warmer" sound. This ignores that the warmness is actually just a distortion (i.e. an error) that sounds pleasant. An amplifier should reproduce the input signal as accurate as possible. Distorting it is then the job of the equalizer.
The sensor does its absolute best to capture exactly the light hitting it. So job done, to the limits of the technology.
As the photographer I configure the lens to change the light hitting the sensor. The sensor never sees an unblurred background if I choose not to allow it, and so the resultant image has a blurred background.
I may then decide there's too much sensor noise and smooth the image slightly, or convert to black and white because it better suits the subject or hides a distracting colour.
The equalizer equivalent is your monitor. You can change its brightness, alter its colour spectrum and turn it off. I still have control over the photograph and what I included in it, just as a musician chooses which sounds to include in their published works.
What the fuck?
most of your professional photographers spend a lot of time in studio shooting stuff. Coffee cups, t-shirts, gold-tipped cables, knick-knacks. That's a good bread-and-butter gig. An iPhone would be fantastic for that, and really is preferable to a big DLSR because you don't need the huge support tripods and you can sync it up to external flashes and all sorts of monitors
Sorry, but no. If you're in a studio you're controlling everything, including the image quality, and a camera phone just isn't going to do it.
The tripods are always there, so you don't tote them with you. The lights all work with your camera. The monitors all work with your camera. You're at peak photographer.
I know at least one professional commercial photog who has a dedicated phone just for running out endless product shots for customers
That's nice for him. For website photographs, or sharing previews of the final shot, for snap & run engagements, that may well be all that's needed. But in the studio, by the time you've added proper lighting, including the background, framed your shot, done any desired post-processing.. it's actually quicker to use a proper camera.
That's strange. Mine does.
I can disable it and use a fully electronic shutter, but I don't have to. I get faster flash sync speeds with the mechanical shutter, and it's better for shooting fast moving objects.
Restaurants should put up a sign saying "for the privacy and courtesy of our customers, no pictures are allowed." And cities should pass bylaws allowing for confiscation of the phone and a fine in such cases.
Why confiscate their phone if they're taking a photograph with their camera?
If you really care about great photography, you're not taking pictures of your meals in restaurants.
Even great photographers take snapshots, but also: What's stopping you taking a great photograph of the excellent meal you're about to enjoy?
something my Canon and its 12x Optical Zoom can handle with ease
12x what exactly? Do you even know what you're talking about?
Depending whether you mean the 120SX (10 Megapixels, 10x zoom) or the 130SX (12.1 Megapixels, 12x zoom) you had a telephoto lens equivalent to a 360 or 336mm. Sure, a mobile phone can't match that - but your camera can't match the wide angle shots a mobile can capture either.
Anyone who thinks the camera in an iPhone, a Galaxy or any other mobile device is capable of doing all the things that even a fairly inexpensive point-and-shoot is capable of doing.
My phone can take pictures my $3k camera can't, mainly because I'll have my phone with me and frequently don't have my camera bag, camera and lenses with me.
Sure, it doesn't offer all the capabilities and control I can get through the more dedicated kit I own, but it's already surpassed the abilities of two inexpensive point & shoot cameras I also still own.
I agree that there's still a massive gap between good dedicated cameras and what's built into phones, but low-end camera sales have collapsed for very good reason.
The challenge with tools like that is that they focus on sensor+lens+jpeg engine quality, and tend to disregard the additional software that can supplement those.
If Apple have invested significantly in identifying that a picture is a portrait, softening the background, sharpening the eyebrows and concealing spots on the face, that makes it easier to take portraits of that type with their phone. The test image is going to struggle to demonstrate this.
(Personally I prefer to shoot RAW and post-process myself. But I like turning portraits black and white, adding a little contrast, accentuating specific hues to really bring out the character in a face. I could do all of that on my phone rather than in Lightroom filters, but why constrain myself to such limited options and a small screen.)
It's similarly going to struggle with how well the software detects a scene with high dynamic range and appropriately chooses automatic settings that really draw out the picture. My S7 is bloody excellent at that - easily matching my "professional" camera.
So really you need a range of tests for a camera, and unless you have every camera you're comparing with you at the time (and even then) it's very hard to properly assess objectively just how good a complete camera package is.
Lens MTF charts are informative, but far from adequate..
No amount of talent in the world can get good shots out of bad cameras.
That's nonsense. You may not get the range of good shots, and you may need to work much harder to get them, but you can get excellent photos out of any modern digital or film camera.
e.g. https://scontent-lht6-1.xx.fbc... doesn't look too shabby.
(not my photo)
His phone's built in camera will work better for family snapshots at dinner than a DSLR too, so his analogy holds.
He's more likely to have his phone with him and less likely to have his wife yell, "Will you put that fucking thing down and act human"
erm. Did you even look at the linked website? That camera has 16 lenses and uses I think nine of them for any given photograph.
9 small lenses could well draw as much light into the system as a larger single lens. Physics, eh?
I've worked in open plan offices my entire career. They're normal in the UK. We don't understand the US pre-occupation with closing off all social interaction.
There's another cultural difference: We're not self-centred arseholes that have to talk about themselves all day. Teach your Sales/Marketing/Communications colleagues not to be inconsiderate cunts and you'll find the working environment improves immensely.
Hmm. To be fair to Apple if you gave people the free half of the OS they'd burst into tears and ask why their computer doesn't work.
Most people don't know Android uses a Linux kernel or that their ATM runs Windows. I don't see many websites telling you the set of Apache Foundation projects they draw together, or which hardware they're deployed on.
So I guess I'm just not getting your point here.
we've never had more access to valuable information
That's a tricky one. There's so much misinformation out there that it's pretty hard knowing when you've found the valuable stuff.
Most people get it wrong much of the time.
No, but apparently you do.
Meanwhile adverts appear inside streaming video that doesn't reach me through HTTP, inside radio streams that aren't HTTP, through online games that don't go anywhere near a web browser.
Or there's my internet enabled TV that throws adverts at me if I try and access any online service. Perhaps you've encountered advertising in your mobile apps? You think Google/Apple/Microsoft aren't tracking everything their users are doing, whether it's on the web or not?
Right here on slashdot. Welp, that sure makes a point.
Well, indeed.
That's strange. You appear to be a sexist racist piece of shit.
Here's a fucking clue: White males are the only people in my country that it's legal to discriminate against on both race and gender grounds. Despite this, poor white males also attain the worse educational outcomes in the country.
Tell me how I abandon this fucking privilege, please.
I neither know nor care. Fuck 'em, I'm not paying for that advertising anyway. I'm just highlighting that they're misreading the demographics to which they're targeting their advertising spend.
Demand that any electronic voting machine survive two days taking votes on something important (e.g. M&Ms vs Skittles) at DefCon before it can be used in an election.
It's free pen testing, what's not to like?
It is possible to assess and address corruption and fraud across multiple different communities and individuals at the same time.
I suspect the FBI is large enough to manage two concurrent investigations.
Given how many adverts for Pampers nappies I see, especially as a proportion of total adverts I see, I think P&G need to get accurate, not creative.
I don't have a small human, I have no intention of having a small human and I don't buy nappies for my friends. Pampers wont fit me and I don't own a 1961 Ferrari 250GT California Spider so I'm really struggling to see how P&G expect a return on that particular advertising spend.
I opted for a beard. Quick trim once a week, operating costs close to zero and the beard trimmer is useful for eyebrows and tidying up the back of the head too so even the capex isn't fully incurred by the beard.
No, it confirms the theory that there's a way to present a winning pitch and both sexes are able to learn and adopt it.
You appear to be sexist in assuming that women are incapable of learning how to appeal to an investor.