A few months ago I upgraded my phone to the iPhone 4s. I was going to quickly snap some photos and write a review when the phone was released but decided that was a dumb idea. Many of my ideas die at the “thinking-of-them” stage. Anyway, I decided a better idea was to take my time, make some pudding, (little known fact, the proof is in there) and THEN do the blog post.
Am I impressed with the 4s camera? why yes, yes I am. Don’t expect unicorns and glitter to appear at every shutter press, but if you understand the limitations of this type of camera, and put it in front of interesting things, you can squeeze some decent work out of it.
Basically, it makes a really clean 8 megapixel image in good light. In low light, it kind of falls apart in terms of image quality, but that’s to be expected of any compact camera with a very small image sensor. Some nice features are the LED flash, wider aperture and ability to tap on part of the image to control focus and meter for auto exposure. Perhaps the nicest feature is the lack of features. Even as a photographer and gadget geek, sometimes I just want to forget about all the tech stuff and just concentrate on composing a good shot. The iPhone will let you do that. It will just get out of your way and record a nice image.
Below are some photo examples I’ve gathered over the past several months which were all shot with the iPhone 4s. Many of them were run through or shot with the instagram app (see username “robandrew” to follow me on IG). Some of them were shot with the native camera and left alone or run through the Photoshop Mobile app. Some of them were run through the full fledged Photoshop on my PC for some exposure tweaks. I printed the full res versions today and they all made very nice 5×7’s at 300 PPI. Many could easily be 8×12 or larger if needed. Just add your own unicorns. And glitter.
