Apple unveils the best photos from the Shot on iPhone Macro Challenge
apple.com
apple.com
Most of these pictures were probably lit very carefully with high quality lights, or else were taken in bright daylight, and the phone was probably held in a high quality tripod. It is also likely that hundreds of dollars worth of software was used to edit each of these images.
It's pretty cool that you can get such nice results from a phone. But you'd probably have an easier time of it on a five year old aps-c camera with a macro lens, to say nothing of modern 35mm cameras.
These images are somewhat analogous to the videos of fake hamburgers that fast food companies use to sell their product. That is, the physical conditions where this picture was taken did exist. It's not totally CG. But the images are designed to make you think that you can get results that practically are out of reach for most of the people looking at the photos.
Still knowing that can also allow you to make better cell phone pictures by taking into account those weaknesses when you're taking pictures. There are valuable techniques to learn from these images, aside from the fact that they are all high quality art.
That's probably true but as a casual hobbyist, it's so much easier to justify spending $1k on a phone and a few hundred on apps than getting buying a legit macro camera setup, especially used camera equipment.
I was frustrated by the macro limitations of the iPhone 13 pro and started perusing for macro camera setups and totally balked at the prices. It made more sense to hold out for another major camera spec bump in the next generation of phones (which is rumored).
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1485795-REG/7artisans...
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=a6100&_sacat=...
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1059024-REG/manfrotto...
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1459178-REG/viltrox_v...
These items come out to a total of about $1,000 and will vastly outperform any iPhone. Note that I am not recommending this particular setup as I am not a macro photographer, I just wanted to demonstrate what's possible. I'm also not saying you're wrong to wait for a better cell phone camera. Your preferences are your own and there is nothing wrong with them. Just trying to provide some information.
It uses a APS-C sensor (dimensions of 23.5 x 15.6 mm). The Micro Four Thirds sensor is 17.3 mm × 13.0 mm
Full Frame is 24 mm x 36 mm.
The thing about larger sensors, for those that aren't aware, is that they produce much better quality images because each pixel is larger, and can gather more light. More light equals a stronger signal, in a noisy ambient.
I sometimes try astrophotography because it lets me combine my photography hobby with my programming passion, and I end up writing my own processing pipelines. With a compact camera, I could get the ghost of one of the brightest galaxies in the sky (Centaurus A in the southern hemisphere). With the MFT camera, using the included kit lens I got a little bit of detail, but it was just a few pixels wide. Switch on to a vintage lens I got for ~15 dollars, and I managed to get the galaxy and quite some detail. Not the same as a telescope image, but very impressive for a 1970's lens on a small camera!
And the noise levels aren't even comparable. My old compact camera was Noisy with a capital N. Of course I didn't realize it when I bought it, but it was[0]. I see the same on phone cameras (the sensors are about the same size now). The MFT even on ISO 25600 (highest it goes to) isn't as noisy as the compact camera was at 3200.
Most phones will cover that with a lot of computation, and that's fine for a small screen. But load your pictures on a large monitor and you'll start seeing the details and differences. However (and it has been said everywhere in the comments) phones are usually way more convenient because you always have it with you.
[0] For reference, some 12 years ago I bought a Canon G12, then a G16, and then moved on to a Olympus OMD E10. On every change I got far better quality at about the same camera size, though the olympus is slightly more bulky, and you have to factor in the lens too.
I don't even understand what you think you're going to buy that will make you a good macro photographer for hundreds of dollars. Hundreds on apps instead of dedicated macro hardware? I can't imagine that will do anything but waste hundreds of dollars.
https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/compare-p...
I've tried a lot of other DAM + editing software and keep coming back to LR. YMMV.
Can confirm, everything out of my dslr + macro lens comes out perfect. It's ridiculous how hard it is to take a bad picture with those. Fluorescent lights, cloudy days, handheld, they're all perfect.
That being said I've definitely used and shared more images from my iPhone macro mode. There have been a bunch of misfires, lighting is hard, sharpness is not there across the board - but it definitely scratches that itch and I find myself using my macro lens less.
Although after writing this I fully expect to run around my house for an hour next time the sun is out to take some macro shots with the macro lens :D
TL;DR - even as a pixel peeper the convenience of having macro on the phone puts dust on my dslr macro lens.
Also, the iPhone 13 camera has ridiculously fast lenses[0]:
Pro 12MP camera system: Telephoto, Wide, and Ultra Wide cameras
Telephoto: ƒ/2.8 aperture
Wide: ƒ/1.5 aperture
Ultra Wide: ƒ/1.8 aperture and 120° field of view
Sounds like you need some more research into macrophotography
The aperture is relative to the diameter of the first lens element. So you can’t just compare these values directly.
The catch is: a phone has a much smaller sensor, so at the same f-stop, across the whole sensor less light is gathered and consequently, you have a weaker signal.
f-stop doesn't mean much other than the maximum that the aperture for that lens can open.
It doesn't indicate lens or element quality, or aberrations. There's a reason that pixel peeping, gear games, and reviewers are so prevalent in high end photography.
As a simple extension to this, most of my lenses work better a few stops before maximum f-stop.
So, yes, but no.
For the rest - yeah, f# is just one of important specifications.
The aspects you are now referring to are about the lens quality. Yes, I would expect a real camera lens to be much better than the lens of an iPhone. There is no doubt about that. But in the posting I answered to, you spoke about the comparability of aperture values.
Your advice to learn more about photography certainly seems good.
[1] §5.2.2 in https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/a_pdf/news/SM2-Medi...
[0]https://photographylife.com/equivalence-also-includes-apertu... [1]https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6780391159/all-apple-iphon...
One thing that people often miss is that you can think about all of this just in terms of the absolute diameter of the aperture (not the f number, just the diameter in mm). For a given angle of view, the diameter of the aperture determines how much light you gather. The question is simply whether a photographer using a DSLR is going to be able to use an aperture that is significantly wider (in mm) than the ~4mm aperture of a phone camera. For depth of field reasons, it's unlikely that they will be able to do so.
(Also, of course, you can't stop down on a phone camera as it has a fixed aperture.)
> Sounds like you need some more research into macrophotography
That undermined your otherwise very factual rebuttal/clarification because it seems like at best an impossible standard (everybody could always use more research into anything), and at worst a "you don't know as much as me" veiled in professionalism/passive aggressiveness. The interpretation is up to the reader (some of whom will be charitable in their interpretation, others will not).
To be clear I'm not accusing you of "the worst" (I have no idea what was in your heart/mind and I don't presume to guess), I'm executing on a personal goal to try and help elevate conversations through useful/constructive feedback. Also I'm not presuming that this comment/feedback is useful or constructive as it may not be, but I hope that it is because that's my goal.
OP’s post was incredibly dismissive and incorrect but was written as if it was from an expert.
It’s textbook misinformation as far as I am concerned.
Why did that person feel the need to attack the poster? What did they gain from it? How did it help the argument?
I don't think there's a single benefit from that line other than to be self-serving statement that says "i know more than you" when their rebuttal did that more effectively while staying on topic.
Direct responses can be intended to educate the person they are responding to, but they can also be intended to warn people around.
Does this person want to get a point across with empathy or do they want to discredit the comment to future readers to avoid the circulation of false information?
See the chart on the first page of this article: https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6780391159/all-apple-iphon...
For a detailed explanation of how to compare f-numbers across cameras have a look at this article: https://photographylife.com/equivalence-also-includes-apertu...
>For example, f/1.5 on the iPhone is equivalent to f/8.2 on a 35mm camera
This is a meaningless statement unless you specify what sort of equivalence you're talking about. I assume you mean to say that they're equivalent in terms of depth of field and in terms of the total amount of light gathered for a given angle of view. This, however, just goes to show that the 35mm camera doesn't have much of an advantage for macro photography. If the 35mm camera has to stop down at least to f8 (which it probably will, to get sufficient depth of field) then it won't gather any more light than the phone.
The basic point here is that for a given angle of view, you can only gather more light than the iPhone if the iPhone has depth of field to spare. Otherwise you can only gather more light than the iPhone by sacrificing depth of field. This is because both the total amount of light gathered (for a given angle of view) and the depth of field (for a given angle of view) are determined by the absolute diameter of the aperture.
The speed of the lens is not the main factor. A Micro4/3 lens at f/2 is cheaper than a full frame lens at f/2, which is cheaper than a medium format in turn. The iPhone's sensors are much smaller still than FF.
The lenses on the iPhone are equivalent to some of the cheapest lenses in any given system.
Indeed, a comparable system would be the 10-18mm EF-S plus whatever kit lens you have.
Talking about relative aperture and angle of view at the same time is incredibly misleading. If you want to talk about angle of view, you need to use absolute aperture.
Further, the wider open the lens, the more shallow the depth of field, which is already quite shallow in macro work. Having the space for proper lighting can allow one to stop the lens down and capture more parts of the image in focus. F# is a secondary consideration as macro often works best at f/8 or f/11.
At typical full frame focal lengths. With the shorter focal length of an iPhone you get much more depth of field for a given aperture.
Lens to object distance is still an important issue in practice however.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/SLR-Camera-Lenses/ci/274/...
When photography was a bigger hobby for me I had an old digital camera that had a great lens, but tiny sensor and could be slow exposure wise. It did have a great set of built in color modes that I had trouble emulating in software ( and didn't want to spend time on that a great deal ) so I kept around and got a cheap-o mono pod and blamo it's slow nature was less of an issue.
Folks with fancy new equipment seemed to struggle emulating what I got with relative ease.
Now I probably couldn't emulate what they did in many situations, but I didn't try either, I knew what that equipment could do and it worked.
The world of photography is a funky world of pixel peepers, TRUE---ish advice, and folks throwing tons of money at equipment and software and hours of editing and ... just sticking with some specific equipment for a while / learning it's nature can save you A LOT of time and money.
> But you'd probably have an easier time of it on a five year old aps-c camera with a macro lens, to say nothing of modern 35mm cameras.
The iPhone camera really is fantastic for what it is (economies of scale are an amazing thing) but you're not wrong. Doing this sort of photography work on an iPhone is more about the challenge than the capabilities.
One of the interesting things about photography is that so many capable cameras and lenses have been produced over the past couple decades that you can stop by eBay and pick up some truly capable gear for relatively cheap if you do your research. It's tempting to get pulled into the world of modern full-frame cameras and the latest glass, but the truth is that an older mirrorless camera combined with some known-good old glass will produce amazing photos.
Things get expensive if you want...
... best low-noise performance (needs sensor from the last ~five years, older stuff usually has color shifts and other issues which are not easy to fix)
... video
... mirrorless
... fast AF (especially if you also want mirrorless)
... all of the above
And in real-life circumstances it’s better than a Google Pixel.
https://petapixel.com/2017/06/30/truth-shot-iphone-style-ads...
The long story short is that reducing the aperture has two effects on image sharpness. Smaller apertures increase the depth of field, bringing more of your scene into focus. Smaller apertures also introduce diffusion, which makes the whole image softer. This tradeoff means that there is a medium aperture which makes your image as sharp as possible.
Photographing people with a 35mm camera, the aperture which maximizes sharpness is often achieved with apertures somewhere around ƒ/5.6 or ƒ/8. It is advantageous to use a 35mm camera because the larger sensor size can reveal more detail and capture more light. 35mm also gives you access to larger apertures and those nice, blurry backgrounds.
In macrophotography, large cameras just aren’t as advantageous. The small apertures that you typically use will produce soft images, and the soft images can be captured well enough on a small sensor. Small cameras give you very blurry backgrounds to begin with, so you wouldn’t choose a large camera to blur the background. Additionally, small cameras require less lens movement, proportional to their size, to focus at the short distances required for macrophotography.
I do some macrophotography with my RZ67. Mostly pictures of flowers. It’s fun, but I know that it would be much more convenient to use a smaller camera, and I wouldn’t be sacrificing image quality. One of the big reasons I use the RZ67 is because it uses a bellows to focus, and the bellows is long enough that you can focus very close. However, there’s a lower limit to the size of the subjects I can comfortably photograph, and if I were serious about macrophotography, I would use a smaller camera.
Summary: Large cameras are better at taking pictures of large things, small cameras are better at taking pictures of small things.
There are exceptions, as my sibling comment points out, but if you go to a list of the top macro photographers and check each one out, 90+% of them will be using 35mm cameras.
Instead, most people come up with all sorts of justifications for why their equipment is the best. And that’s ok. In the end, photographers take good pictures and we are happy. There is no underlying need for photographers to use the “best” equipment available to them, and in actual practice, you will find photos in galleries taken using a camera phone or a cheap plastic Holga, hung right next to pictures taken on a 4x5" that look immaculate.
> Perhaps you get some advantage of more depth of field, but 35mm camera lenses can be stopped down to achieve the same effect, when it is desired.
The premise I’m operating under is that you’ll make, more or less, the same artistic choices with different equipment. In other words, if you shoot micro four thirds and switch to 35mm, you double the ƒ-number (e.g. go from ƒ/11 to ƒ/22), get roughly the same depth of field, roughly the same field of view, roughly the same image sharpness.
There are two problems here. One problem is that the image is not particularly sharp to begin with, so any extra resolution provided by a better sensor is wasted. The second problem is that larger lenses are operated farther from their ideal focal distances.
The formula for focal distance of an ideal lens is
1/ƒ = 1/d1 + 1/d2,
where ƒ is the focal length, d1 is the subject distance, and d2 is the distance to the image. Normally, d1 >> d2, and you can consider a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera as the same as a 25mm lens on micro four thirds. For macrophotography, d1 ≈ d2, and changing the sensor size has a radical impact on how far a lens must be moved to remain in focus in relative terms. That is, when you double the sensor size, you have to more than double the distance you move the lens.
This means that larger lenses are operating farther outside their ideal focal distances, and this has a negative impact on image sharpness. Macro lenses are specifically designed to be operated in this range, but the fact remains, larger lenses are still operating in a more extreme regime compared to smaller lenses.
You get pretty good results by just copying what most people use, but the fact than 90+% of people are using equipment X does not mean that equipment X is ideal. Plenty of musicians have completely incorrect notions about what kind of impact various choices they make about their gear has on how they sound, too—these beliefs often completely fail to hold up under any reasonable amount of scrutiny.
Photographers commonly believe that larger lenses take better pictures. Reality is more complicated—there are a ton of tradeoffs both with lens design from a practical perspective and tradeoffs involving the underlying physics that make the situation much more complicated.
Sure, but how often do you have them on your person in time to take candid photos?
I am in a lot of entomology and myrmecology online groups and people are able to take clear photos of insects that look like professional macro photos using their phones. Before that, only a handful of pro/powerusers were able to share this kind of quality.
When asked what camera he used, one popular youtuber (I cannot remember the exact context) explained that while expensive cameras are better on paper he often relies on his iPhone + a cheap ring light clipped on it. Animals often act in interesting ways when you are not ready for it. The ease of using the device that is in your pocket often outweight the potential increase in quality that would come from setting up a studio level setup. The best picture is the one you are able to take.
I'm not sure what YouTuber you're referring to, but most popular photography YouTubers mostly use real cameras still. Occasionally they'll do a gimmick video where they use a phone, but it's the exception, not the rule.
Totally bad argument in justifying phone cameras. If you are having the expectation of getting photos of similar quality as shown on the page, my question is, how often do you have a high quality ring light on your person along with a stable tripod?
Personally, I have a lot of ring lights because beauty and makeup brands give them for free with a lot of products.
But even without all of this, you can get great footage and photos.
Take a look at this spider that was walking around my sink for example.
The phone (pixel 3, already quite aged) did not have a lot of trouble to focus on it even if we are talking about a small spider that is only a few milimiter in size.
It's a video so focus comes and goes but the parts where the focus is set on the spider are quite clear (ignoring the upload compression).
I am no artist and was focusing more on the spider's behavior. Someone who is an artist could have snapped great macros at that moment.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/z2RALoGeXiAo6uHG6
Another example is this queen ant when it was in it's founding stage. The nanitics (first workers) are small even when it comes to ant scale. You can see them in great details and can even see the translucent parts of their gaster with the sugar water inside.
Again, I focused on the behavior more than the art. But an artist could have taken a photo instead of a video with great results.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/dmzMXLqG5v1cfFKx9
Both of those were candid moments that I happened to snap because I had my phone in my pocket while my 4k camera and my canon reflex were in their box in my desk.
I think the pictures on that page are aspirational, to be sure... but my own experience with this camera system suggest that they're not out of reach.
Here's one of the first macro pictures I took with an iPhone 13 Pro a day or two after I got it, completely without stabilization, on a momentary stop while I was walking my dog: https://imgur.com/uux8RNS (I'm not saying I'm a good photographer; this is just for technical purposes. It's also unedited.)
Compare that to the "leaf illumination" picture in the article. The professional's picture is noticeably better, of course. But it's more a matter of framing and choice of subject than any hardware limitation.
Not sure if this is true for macro. For a given angle of view, the amount of light collected is determined by the absolute diameter of the aperture (as opposed to the f number). It’s rarely practical to use a very wide aperture for macro photography on a DSLR for depth of field reasons. People do all sorts of unnecessarily complex calculations with crop factors, but in this scenario all you have to think about is the diameter of the aperture in mm. The phone has an aperture of perhaps around 3-4mm. You’re unlikely to use a wider aperture than that shooting macro on APS-C or full frame.
Like they do with "professional" cameras as well.
You don’t have to speculate. Most of the photographers directly tell you how these were set up:
> love going on early morning walks with my iPhone 13 Pro. The ‘golden hour’ brings the best out of nature
> I’ve used a spot studio light on the lily with a dark background.
> This one instance was during the sliver of golden hour when the sun is shining directly into my window, illuminating all of the tiny cells in each leaf.
> I used two items that I found in my kitchen fridge: a strawberry and a can of soda. I placed a clear vase on my kitchen counter, poured the soda into the vase, and used a piece of black paper as the background. I then dropped the strawberry in the vase of soda and waited. Slowly, bubbles began to form on the surface of the strawberry, and its texture was completely transformed.
> This image was taken along the edge of Riverside Park in Manhattan while on a morning walk with our puppy this winter.
> This tiny, shimmering liquid jewel is delicately nestled at the base of a leaf after a tropical storm, almost imperceptible to the human eye.
> The photo was taken when my 3-year-old son discovered the blossom of the tulip at home. I then appreciated the flower with my son and took out my iPhone, trying to capture the moment when the sun kissed the flower, which created a perfect shadow at the petals. As I moved my iPhone closer to the flower, it automatically turned on macro mode,
It is entirely possible for someone on a tight budget to make their own studio-like lighting, and there are good photo editing tools available for free. Saying «don’t bother to be inspired by these lovely smartphone photos because some professionals spend thousands of dollars on lighting and Photoshop» is lazy cynical negativity in the extreme. And «people who win photography contests are typically more careful tool users than an average person with no experience» is hardly a deep insight.
Why is a high-quality tripod needed? You can just set the camera to be on a timer so that it's not shaking (from you touching the shutter button) when it captures the photo. I think it's also possible to use an Apple Watch to trigger the shutter.
> It is also likely that hundreds of dollars worth of software was used to edit each of these images.
Do photo contests typically allow entrants to heavily edit photos?
To my knowledge - yes
This is going to depend on the genre of the contest, but for most contest types outside of the journalistic realm editing style will very much be a part of the process. You will typically submit the final print and no one will know what the original picture was. There are some contests out there with some pretty outrageous editing though!
this is not true. the iPhone camera's sensor receives the same density of light from its f/1.8 lens than any old traditional camera using an f/1.8 lens. this means the stops are identical. of course the total amount of light that passes through the iPhone's lens is much smaller than a normal camera's, but that has no bearing on the photo's exposure. the real difference rests in the signal to noise ratio, which is determined by pixel density, and that's why smartphone photos are incredibly noisy.
That difference is exactly what I'm talking about. You'll generally find that a cell phone photo has about the same noise once if you divide the ISO by the square of the relative crop factor (and set exposure accordingly). Coincidentally, you also need to use an aperture that's faster by the relative crop factor to get the same level of background blur.
These pictures btw were not taken this way. The reason I know is because I talked to the Italian winner and Apple about exactly that.
Check this one out: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0b1PRNfudllgp0q1LyuHrW1OQ...
Taken at dusk. No other lights.
1/83 sec
1.57 mm
ISO 320
No flash
For something taken at dusk, I'm surprised of the lack of sunset colors in the background. I would absolutely believe that shutter speed would produce that sharpness. And the depth of field looks like it would be aligned with a macro shot.
Hell, the iPhone 13 camera can take night shots better than what I can see in some cases.
Okay, okay, I know, it's Apple, this is a marketing campaign.
I guess next time, I'm going to take a photo of the contents of my fridge, with the caption:
"Every morning, when I check my new iPhone 14 Pro Max Plus, I'm filled with a sense of inspiration. The new Wake Up feature really gives me a boost of energy, even on cloudy days like when I took this photo of an avocado. The deep, dark green of the rind reminds me of the striking new Alpine Green color of my new iPhone 14 Pro Max Plus, and the texture couldn't be more vivid than shot by the new Macro+ Holographic Lens."
The contest was only open to photos taken from an iPhone. This is mentioned in the heading, sub-heading and opening paragraph.
- A future excerpt from the Federighi household, probably
If you look at the photos close up they don't look amazingly sharp, and the "blur" around the edges looks a bit odd (not sure if this is just a macro lens thing or something iPhone specific), but regardless, it's a pretty awesome capability to have in your pocket at all times!
[0]https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1532833-REG/dot_line_...
HDR is also a style, and at least they made it optional and not forced on every single image. Hopefully any focus stacking will be optional as well.
Is this correct? From what I've shot in macro on my DSLR, the blur is natural because the focus plane is so thin. I realize the phone has a much smaller sensor, but is the blur in macro mode computational? I thought that effect was only applied in portrait mode shots.
Using Halide or similar with RAW substantially improves your control.
"Real digital cameras" also have computational photography a.k.a. sharpening, auto exposure and auto white balance.
"real photographers" set up their camera with the settings they prefer and develop in post. i'm deliberately using quotes there as photo journalists have been forced to do certain things that would go against the norms as mandates have come down upon them. These mandates are meant to ensure claims about mainipulation in post has a little ground to stand on, but the people making those mandates don't understand what they are mandating with their PHB directives.
Part of that developing is taking 10x the number of actual photos you want so you can delete the ones that're overexposed or too blurry. And you have to deal with all the data of keeping uncompressed RAWs around.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/have-iphon...
You're right though that this isn't a "perfect example of computational depth of field" as the background leaf looks far enough away where you could have achieved the effect optically on iPhone sensor with right aperature. That being said the blurring does look unnatural to me as it is not even across the background leaf despite similar distance from lens. It's not clear cut though.
Example here: https://imgur.com/a/cPG3YSP
I told him to switch to his smartphone. He'd be able to get in closer. The scale of the lens more closely matched the scale of the scene, so the relative angles between foreground and background objects would more closely match our expectations of being a full-sized scene. It came out great. Yes, we had to dump light on the thing to get the images to not be grainy. But the images had more of an "on the ground" feel.
Because of that (and my own experiences with smartphone photography), I feel like these images all fail to use the hardware effectively to do something unique.
Some others have talked about the differences in lenses and sensor sizes and all that, that makes high-quality smartphone photography so much harder than SLR photography. Yes, that is true, for the sorts of images that you would take with an SLR. But that's not the only kind of images you can take.
The popularity of the SLR is both its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. It's advantageous because there are TONS of accessories and guides and examples, etc. ad nauseum. It's a curse because it sucks all the air out of the room in regards to other types of cameras. There are so many, many different types of cameras, and they all make unique shots that you really can't replicate with the other types of cameras.
Few people have really explored what that means for smartphone cameras. It's clear that it would need to be used in ways that are unique to the device. Not just "it's the best camera you have with you, because your other camera is too heavy to always have on you." But stuff like, "because the lens is so tiny, we can squeeze shots out of tiny holes that would block a normal SLR". Stuff like, "this camera is a Star Trek tricorder connected to a global information network." I rarely ever see that.
My children are so close to the ground they can observe things I just walk by. They are constantly pointing out to me things they find beautiful in their tiny details. Admittedly I've trained them to be highly observant but they've outdone me in a short time.
You'll note that the photographer there is shooing with a lens that has a fairly long barrel. For the Nikkor 105mm macro lens - https://coinimaging.com/nikon_105vr.html
At 1:1, there's 15.3 cm between the front of the lens and the subject.
But if you're shooting with a rather short lens (e.g. those in the camera of a phone) then the working distance is very close.
This becomes important important when photographing insects (you'll note there are no photos of insects in that collection)
Some other lenses and their working distances - https://www.kielia.de/photography/calculator/working-distanc...
The Olympus 30mm shooting as a macro lens has a working distance of 16mm (quite different than the 153mm of the Nikkor 105mm macro lens).
The "getting close" also impacts the "how do you light it" and keeping the subject out of the shadow of the camera.
The “how to light it” is probably a bigger point. Even with a ~100mm lens, dealing with the lens’ shadow can be annoying.
I've gotten some interesting insect shots using Nikon 70-300 f/4.5-5.6G ED from a short distance.
I think people sometimes get too caught up with the gear instead of trying out what they have.
Let's leave pure love of photography aside for the sake of argument.
The best camera is the one you have available. Kids are mobile and wild and often do memorable things at unexpected time. Whipping out your iPhone and taking a video or picture is easy and pretty much always capable.
Phone cameras, with much processing magic, do produce pretty good pictures. And pretty good pictures beat non existent excellent pictures because you didn’t lug your camera around.
All the time I also mostly had the latest iPhone.
The iPhone takes great pictures with little work in many (most?) situations.
Is it worth buying a non-phone camera in 2022? I think if you really like taking pictures and are bumping into phone limitations, sure. But, if I started today, I would get a flagship phone first and grow from there.
Yes.
You definitely can get better pictures out of a camera than a phone if you want to put in the time and the work, not just of using a camera instead of a phone, but of learning how to get the most out of a camera. But it is a lot of time and a lot of work, and given the capital investment not something I'd recommend taking on until you've pushed your phone as far as it can go and find you still want to go further.
Too, you mention a baby coming. Not saying this is you, but I've lost count of the guys I've worked with who get all excited with a baby on the way, buy a camera, and knowing I'm a photographer ask lots of questions about how to use it well - then, three months later, they're back to their phones because it turns out "the best camera is the one you have with you" is a cliché because it's true.
Lately most of my work is chasing wasps around with a macro rig, and let me tell you: there is no wild animal on Earth, a baby included, who will wait around for you to set up a shot. They're going to do what they're going to do, and whether you get the shot you want is entirely your problem. If you want to get that shot with a camera, that means not just knowing how to use the camera, but having it at hand and ready to shoot basically all the time. Which you can do! But you've already got your phone with you all the time anyway, you already know how to use it, you already keep its battery charged - and not for nothing, but a phone'll take a lot more abuse than just about any camera ever made, and we're talking about a baby here.
Which brings me back to the point of time. The shots I get (and occasionally post at https://aaron-m.com/topic/images) are the product, not just of hours of effort in capture and post, but also of four years I spent making photography a daily part of my life. I didn't go anywhere without my camera - eventually, my cameras, both the macro and the 200-500mm tele birding rig. I bought a giant backpack specifically because it would fit them both, I took them out with me on breaks at work, I walked all over God's green earth with them looking for good spots and eventually for good insects and spiders - I more or less lived and breathed photography for four solid years, long enough to figure out what I really wanted to do and get pretty damn good at it for an amateur with a full-time job.
I don't say this to brag, but to make clear the point that you want to think about whether that's the kind of time you want to invest, and the kind of time you can invest - with a baby on the way, and with a phone that if we're being honest already does 90+% of what the best DSLR or mirrorless on the planet can do. Sure, I happen to live firmly within the 10% that phones can't match, or at least not yet. Nobody thinks about the macro wildlife photography that I do as a phone camera use case. Taking pictures of babies, though? People in general? That's where phone cameras live. For that, I can't do better, or even as well - I'd have needed to spend those four years doing portrait work instead. (Or human portrait work, anyway...)
So yeah, I'd say save the money and the frustration, and revisit the idea of a DSLR or mirrorless once you can clearly articulate a reason why you might need one. Until then, your phone's going to serve you much better than any discrete camera will.
“The Final Bloom” is absolutely beautiful however.
The positive conclusion is that relatively speaking, when reasoning from a smartphone without any macro capabilities, it is a meaningful breakthrough. And this matters as for many people it's their only camera. If you enjoy current smartphone photography, macro is no gimmick, it's perhaps the style of photography that is most creative, fun, and full of untapped potential to get unique shots.
When comparing to the big gear, this should be seen as a start at best. It drastically falls short in many ways.
As a first example, the "Sea glass" photo. Which is wonderfully misleading. The photo is artistically attractive but technically crap. It lacks real sharpness and definition, there's the plastic-like noise reduction, and you'll see "trails" in parts of the image, a result of computational processing of multiple exposures.
Whilst you might not care in this case because the artistic quality distracts you from those glitches, they are a real issue in many photos. Macro photography is defined by a lack of light. The mobile workarounds are extremely aggressive and create tons of glitches all the time.
My second point is on the flowers. They are very large. And that's one of my conclusions, macro mode works pretty decently (for a phone) on decently sized subjects. It's closeup photography, not macro photography. To illustrate the difference in capability, the smallest flower is photographed is 3mm. I'm filling the frame with it and then still have 40-50MP of cropping space. And details are actual details, not some computed blur or guess.
Still, for a lot of people closeup photography is a new capability. I'm just saying to not think it rivals macro photography.
Finally, in macro photography subject isolation is important, clear details with a smooth and soft background. Macro mode does not do that, it fakes the blur and often gets it wrong. In particular it computes some kind of half-state: soft but still with details, which is optically impossible and looks crap.
Don't let my words discourage you though. It a step up in mobile photography, good to have this capability in your pocket. Let it make you fall in love with the endless possibilities of closeup/macro photography, and some of you might take it beyond the phone.
j/k
These pictures have been made by people who have photography as a serious hobby and know what they are doing, hence the well-lit and positioned scenes. I have not been able to make a picture like these without a lot of effort. But it is possible.
That said, it's a pretty incredible feature so far!