Real world test for iPhone 5S photography

An informal press event at Telecom NZ meant I left the MacBook Air and iPad Air at home before heading into town with the iPhone 5S. The goal was to see how much I could get done with the handset.

While Telecom Retail CEO Chris Quin was speaking

I used the iPhone 5S to grab this shot of Telecom Retail CEO Chris Quin speaking. While I’m never going to win prizes for my photography, it’s not bad.

This was the first time I used the iPhone 5S to take real photos for work – as opposed to testing the phone’s camera purely for review purposes. It required almost no effort, just pointing and clicking.

While it’s possible to do everything on the run, that’s not the best way to work. With work photos I usually take a dozen of so shots, pick the best one, transfer it to the Mac and crop it or otherwise process for publishing.

iPhone Camera app seems idiot proof

Overall this worked well. Although I’m not familiar with the iPhone Camera app, it seems idiot proof. There’s no time to fiddle with settings when taking pictures during a press conference, so it has to capture good images with a minimum of fuss. The lighting in the room wasn’t particularly good, but the phone automatically adjusted its settings.

How does this compare with recent experience? For much of the past year I’ve used my Nokia Lumia 920 for day-to-day photography. Some of the other images on this site come from the Lumia 920 – see this recent one from the Microsoft Surface 2 launch.

There was better lighting at Telecom NZ, but the image is clearly crisp. You wouldn’t know unless I told you, but I cropped the iPhone image much tighter and it still didn’t lose sharpness.

Pixel size matters

On paper the iPhone 5S and Lumia 920 cameras have similar specifications. The iPhone 5S has 8 megapixels, each pixel is 1.5µ. The Lumia has 8.7 megapixels with each being 1.4µ. Bigger pixels help with noise reduction, which means a better picture. Clearly 0.1µ makes a difference. Both have image stabilisation – frankly I’ll never buy another phone that doesn’t have this feature.

Getting the image from the iPhone to the Mac was harder than I anticipated. I put this down to inexperience. To my surprise Airdrop didn’t work. It turns out the technology doesn’t allow iOS7 devices to share with OS X devices. That’s something Apple needs to fix.

I also ran into problems using a straightforward Bluetooth link between the devices. This is how I send photos to the MacBook from my Lumia, so you’d think this would be trivial between Apple devices. I couldn’t figure out how it was done. Perhaps I need more training.

iCloud rains on the parade

iOS 7’s Photo app has an option to load images to iCloud. I did this, but couldn’t quickly find out how to access these images from iPhoto on the MacBook Air. In the end I simply emailed the pictures to myself and picked them up on the Mac. Later, after the job was done I discovered the iCloud option isn’t visible when you use iPhoto in full screen mode. A useful lesson.

In the past I used Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks to crop and otherwise fix up images for the website. It seemed a good time to attempt the job using iPhoto. It is so much easier to use and more efficient than Adobe’s heavy duty tools that I can’t see myself going back to the old work practice. Chalk that up as a win for Apple.

Overall, I’m happy with how this worked out. Getting pictures from the iPhone to the Mac was a little harder than expected, but otherwise I’ve picked up some useful lessons.