Photographer showcases the power of iPhone 15 pro max | Hacker News Reader

Photographer showcases the power of iPhone 15 pro max

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A friend of mine once had a guitar, it was a cheap squire strat, even as a learner I thought I could tell it was a terrible guitar, the action was so high I think it legally needed a transponder. Anyway, one day a friend brings one of their musician friends over, he picks up the guitar and shreds on this thing like I've never seen before, it sounds incredible, he doesn't complain about the guitar at all, he just rips on it.

I learned an important lesson that day about artistic pursuits. It's rarely the tool/instrument. It's mostly the artist.

Same with $10,000 triathlon bicycle versus a $900. It's the person's legs not the bicycle.

At top tier levels, I am sure there is a difference. Lance Armstrong could probably have a measurable percentage performance increase using a $10k bike vs an off the shelf. For your normal performer, technique is going to matter significantly more than equipment.

The $10,000 bicycle will be as reliable, light, sturdy, and comfortable as possible with the available technology. You don't want your brakes going out on a 2000+ mile race. Most people only need what a $900 or under bicycle offers, so the $10,000 price is mostly from low volume: that's only ~12 $900 bicycles.

It's the same reason this costs $11k: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1473009-REG/blackmagi...

Only a few people need it, and those few people can justify the cost of a niche tool with small production runs.

You put pog on a $900 bike, and then on a $10k bike and you'll see a measurable improvement in performance.

At the top end ever watt helps. Will a casual on a 10k bike beat pog on a $900 bike? Absolutely not.

The analogy doesn't QUITE hold to photography however. No matter how skilled you are, a crappy small sensor in a dark room will pretty much always be awful. Can a skilled photographer make it look a bit less bad? Sure, but there are physical limitations in play here.

Partially agreed, but it is kind of a mixed bag.

For someone who is already extremely good, they can deliver a killer performance even on a half-broken instrument. But for someone who is in the earlier stages of learning, this often just hinders them. Especially since a lot of habits learned early on are very difficult to correct later on, when it comes to music instruments. And having a terrible instrument can easily help with forming poor habits.

However, there is definitely a significant category of people who are more about upgrading and/or collecting gear rather than focusing on improving the actual skill. In that scenario, “this better instrument surely will be the reason for my skill getting improved” is used as a pretty common excuse. I would know, because i definitely fell for it before in certain aspects.

Note: not trying to take a dig at Squire, afaik their current offerings are all pretty decent entry level instruments. Was just addressing the overall larger point.

I learned to play guitar on a very crappy guitar. It was from a brand known for being cheap and poor quality, and I've bought it second hand. Still, I learned to play on it. Chords. Scales, arpeggios; you name it. Execution was really bad though, because the instrument was the limiting factor. So, I agree that, in some ways, the instrument was a limiting factor.

One day I got to play on a very good guitar. All the stuff I struggled to play on the cheap guitar came out almost flawless. It felt like before I was racing F1 with a scooter, and then I've finally gotten a proper F1 car.

So, all this is to say that yes, maybe if I had started with a good guitar I wouldn't have struggled as much but, I think the fact I had to put in twice the effort to learn the same things on the crap guitar actually helped me improve (faster? better?). Of course, at one point I had to upgrade the guitar because there were things I couldn't do and it was holding me back but, I think starting with the bad guitar was a good thing (for me personally).

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-v6LWMzM8L4

"nah, nah this action is good"

These images all reenforce only one thing - that Reuben Wu is a fantastic photographer. For him the iPhone is just a tool, much as a knife for a chef or a keyboard & monitor for a developer.

You're not wrong but on the other hand, if the knife can't cut, that will hamper the chef.

Also Wu had this to say, “The iPhone 15 Pro is the best camera available for its size, and while it can’t replace bigger dedicated systems, it can create images which still push my own artistic vision and display them at gallery quality and sizes, and I was shocked how good the prints were.”

Pretty decent endorsement really.

That's how I see it. The article doesn't say that I can take pictures like this, but that the phone itself is capable of it.

A great knife doesn't mean I can be Gordon Ramsay, but it does mean that I can't blame my bad stew on the tools I used.

While I agree with what you say and it's a worthwhile point to make, it's still notable when a tool can be used in such a way by an artist. Wu could have taken amazing photos with an iPhone 1, but he (most likely) couldn't have taken these specific images due to resolution and exposure performance/control differences.

Only one thing? Not so fast young cowboy. They also show that the phone is capable and even if a Huawei or whatever has a better camera, it is possible to create fantastic photographs.

"We at Razor are proud to present the GitHub projects that we commissioned Sanjay Ghemawat to develop on the new Razer Gauntlet(TM) 3 split keyboard."

These photos are beautiful. But none of them strike me as "photography" in the traditional sense of "objective capture of the light at a scene" but rather all look like hyperrealistic digital art. If it was labeled as Dalle3 output I'd believe it.

That's not at all a knock on the photographer. There's a ton of creativity and skill that goes into producing these, particularly at the high res in the gallery display.

But it's interesting that photography and digital art are converging to a similar point. We're not too far from a high res raw image + DalleX being able to produce any imagery this artist + iPhoneX could create.

Here's my example of a traditional photograph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/US...

Light painting photography has been around for quite a long time, I wouldn’t call it an imitation of digital art, nor non-traditional.

https://lightpaintingphotography.com/light-painting-history/

Aiming for objective capture of light is a kind of photography. Even the best camera and most careful selection of lens and settings isn't objective, so it's only an ideal for those people, and an impossible one to reach.

Some people certainly go for the still life type of photography. It is emphatically not the only or even a significant part of photography as an art. All the best photography has something of the photographer in it. Even the still life stuff is composed in and out of the camera.

There needs to be a control example. Show us how these scenes would look on iPhone 14 or a random Samsung. How much is from the camera, and how much of the image is the subject matter.

You left out "and how much of the image is the artist"

I am impressed that he used the default Camera app and not a 3rd party like Halide.

But, I also want to know how much tweaking was done in post-processing. Sounds like he used Apple's ProRaw format, which I haven't played with much. Does it need the same level of processing as a normal Raw from a consumer mirrorless camera? Or is it as simple as hitting the "Enhance" button in the Photos app?

The main difference with Apple's raw format is that it includes the object-detecting tone maps so you can adjust them.

Most of the complaints in this story have been pretty dumb, but you have a really solid idea here. I am guessing Apple has an agreement with Wu to prevent it, but it would be cool to see.

I think it would inspire other photographers to not sweat the equipment factor too much.

This is always my biggest gripe with these comparisons. But 14 is not enough, please show the 11 and 12.

Yeah but they won't do that. Image from much cheaper smartphone would be comparable (at least enough to make you think twice about the price difference) and a shot from a "real" DSLR or mirrorless camera would have so much better details and lightning in general that wouldn't even look at the iPhone shot even after gigantic amount of post-processing.

The fact he use light painting as a theme is not random in my opinion, because it is one of the "subjects" in photography where it is easier to make up for a worse quality sensor. You just need a tripod and patience. Which is exactly what he did (he is a photographer he knows his stuff it seems...). If it were about instantaneous shots, the iphone wouldn't far as well and way worse if we were to compare with pro level camera.

The difficulty for a sensor/optics combo is to capture as much details as possible as fast as possible (movings things will create all kinds of artifacts). Which is why a camera that is able to capture a fast moving car in lots of details is expensive.

But Apple is trying to sell their stuff as if it could compete or even replace that kind of gear by using shots that were deliberately constrained to a much easier form of photography.

This is disingenuous and pure marketing nonsense...

Iphone PRO cameras have performed on pair with DSLR camera in many categories since version 12. Besides that, the article reek too much of marketing for my taste.

On a related note, I would much prefer if Iphone Pro Max could shed 50-75 grams by adding a less capable camera. It is just too heavy.

The sad sight of Japanese camera manufacturers entirely missing the software revolution. Farewell...

How were they realistically ever going to compete with a 600lb Gorilla like Apple when it comes to Software?

The best they could always do is make the lithographic equipment used to make iPhones, the lenses used to make iPhones, and cameras that could take an excellent raw image that you could process on your MacBook. Which is exactly what they sell.

Using their decades' head start! Did they even try to develop software? Support open firmware and file formats to support computational photography? (That is what the Android project set out to do before pivoting into cell phones.) They did not.

Meanwhile Apple built a new category from scratch.

The issue is that computational photography is mostly useful in the consumer market yet the point and shoot was always doomed.

Maybe Sony specifically deserves criticism for not pivoting hard into cellphones with computational photography chops. I’m not sure who else could have realistically succeeded in the new mainstream photography market.

> Did they even try to develop software?

What for? When using a high-end camera, there is zero need to try to process the image on the camera. The camera hardware is about capturing the best possible RAW image which you then process on a desktop computer which has way more CPU and RAM than any camera could possibly have along with unlimited electricity (not running off a tiny battery).

You're thinking conservatively. The camera could capture information that could be used to refocus, denoise, infer depth, and more. They could have attached more sensors, like cell phones have, to power some of these things.

More sensors isn't software, that's hardware. What should these sensors do?

What do you mean by refocus and infer depth?

Denoise is done in post processing and can (depending on quality) take a lot of CPU. Not something to do on camera.

I use DxO for processing RAW images. It'll peg all the cores on my desktop to 100%, haven't measured the watts consumption during that but it's not something a little battery can deliver. The idea of running something DxO-equivalent on camera is unreasonable. And why would I want something inferior? I don't see a use case for trying to do post-processing on-camera.

Doesn't Sony make the iPhone's cameras?

Yes, but it's very unlikely Apple would work with Sony (for any amount of money Sony could muster) to make the software on their cameras better.

Well they do. Apple licenses the ProRes codec to Sony.

I don’t think the idea or licensing computational photography software to them is that unthinkable either. I just don’t think such a deal makes sense with Sony’s pro-centric business strategy and Apple’s narrow focus.

yeah, I wish their ILCs had something as simple and ubiquitous as Live Photos

that show so much of the moment and many people like them

Depends on what you're after.

"Automatic computational photography"? the camera manufacturers have nothing. But I'd argue it doesn't really matter. If you're going out of your way to carry a big-ass camera (and even the micro 4/3 models are huge compared to an iphone - they don't fit in any jeans' pockets), you probably don't care for "software enhancements on the go", and you'll put your pictures through some kind of non-automatic processing on a computer at home anyway.

Now, I haven't tested the iphone 15 pro, but the 14 pro can't hold a candle to a 2016 Olympus Pen-F (micro 4/3 format) when it comes to gradients, details, etc. And when that camera came out, it wasn't even state of the art, it's just what I have lying around to compare.

The iPhones look great at night when you compare them to other phones, but they're absolute garbage when compared to an actual camera, even many years old. Even the "software revolution" can't help them.

But, they absolutely wipe the floor with actual cameras when you need something that fits in your pocket. A camera in your hand is infinitely better than a camera at home you didn't bother to drag around town with you. And it's the reason why, as a tripod carrying-dude, I love my iphone: I have it with me all the time, and it allows me to take pictures the pen-f sitting in a drawer at home can only dream about.

But when I like what I've shot with the phone, I'll haul the pen-f the next day if possible and take a picture of the same spot that will actually get printed.

They are all very pretty, but they are also the sort of photograph that it's hard to spot errors in. What color should it be? What is the texture of the rocks? I have no idea. This could be an accurate picture or an inaccurate one, I have no way of knowing.

Picture of the human face are best for picking up artifacts. You'll spot anything wrong almost immediately, you have hardware for that.

Maybe it has a great camera but the average user will never make photos like this. It would have been better to take more real life photos

True, though the better a camera is, the easier it is to take better shots. For instance, if you've only used point-and-shoot cameras and phone cameras, then you try out a nice pro-sumer or pro DSLR, it's amazing how much better your photos look just by switching cameras.

I don't know - I have a bunch of the "prosumer" Sony full-frame cameras (A9, A7RIV) and I usually take all my family and vacation photos with the phone camera. I only pull out the full-frame when the conditions are right or I make a dedicated effort to take "good photos".

Smaller cameras are imo better tweaked for immediate output, pro/sumer cameras are tweaked for "more options in processing". Sure, some point and shoot cams had AF issues or you might not like their color presets but imo they often take better shots in general (when you don't want to post-processing time into them!).

Imo, photos taken with proper camera take work to make the images really look good. The end-result can be a lot better but straight-out-of-camera a phone is better tweaked for "good enough", even though the "full potential" output does not compare at all to a full-frame cameras full potential.

I was not impressed. I think the color tech and scenery were the eye candy not the compositions. Imagine those scenes if they were done with a pin-hole camera? I believe the subsequent impressionistic views would inspire one's imagination to create and finish the composition, and that would be more engrossing. YMMV

I’ve seen these photos a week or two ago, but didn’t read the accompanying text.

I hadn’t realized they where shot with iPhone™ and/or where part of advertisement text.

I wonder if there is something unique about the iPhone camera that a Pixel couldn't do it it was my in the hands of the master.

There are a few really compet ‘pro’ features now:

https://prolost.com/blog/applelog

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37840503

Photos just show that it's capable of long exposure.

Step 1 - Be an amazing photographer.

Step 2 - Give them anything to shoot with up to and including a literal potato.

Step 3 - Be amazed at how good of results they get.

Look, I love my iPhone and my Nikon. But at the end of the day in most photography forums you'll see the recommendation to "use what you have". Expensive body and fancy glass only goes so far. You can use the worlds most expensive camera and still take shitty pictures. You can use a Gameboy Camera and still take good pictures.

That all being said, I think these photos are a great demonstration of "use what you have". It doesn't really matter that it's the new iPhone 21 Pro Max Ultra w/ Quantum Tunneling. You can take amazing photos with a little bit of creativity and a practiced eye. In fact, "limitation breeds creativity" is doubly true with the many limitations of an iPhone camera.

Award-winning professional photographer takes photos with an iPhone and a tripod, artificial lighting, long exposure and hours/days spent in post processing. Apple – "buy our phone and you too will be able to get pictures like these!"

Reads like an ad-copy/Apple press release...

It presents work commissioned by Apple. So it is more like an advertorial.

It is, the images are all “courtesy of Apple.” Why else would a pro photographer with good gear travel to cool places with professional lighting equipment and then take the photo with an iPhone?

Yeah, if he just had decided to make to photographs of those places he would have avoided the trouble of carrying tripod and others gear used for those light paint shot. Instead he would have just hiked with a simple mirrorless camera and take 1/10th of the time to shoot with more details. Back at home, he would have spent half as much time in post-processing with the shots still looking better (not washed-up dark shot over corrected for denoising).

But, (there is always a but) he would be a few hundred K poorer so it doesn't matter to him in the end. Now he has enough money to go take all the real shots he wants...

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