iPhone 3GS and the San Francisco Bay
These three photos and a movie were shot with my trusty iPhone 3GS as part of my ten a day project that I’ve been on. At least ten photos or movies a day with the iPhone was the deal I made with myself before plunking down the cash on it. So far, except for conference shoot days (I give myself a pass on these days since I’m already shooting so much anyway), I’ve been pretty good about it most days.
I did miss my target yesterday. Something about catching up on sleep after three early mornings and then catching up with email and the like. Today, however, I made sure to get back on the horse and went for a walk along the bay.
To get things just right exposure-wise in this tricky scenario, I did have to do a bit of experimentation with setting the focus/exposure point. If there’s any one thing I’d love to have on this camera, it’s an exposure compensation control of some sort. Maybe a double finger gesture up and down to bias the exposure program for the next exposure?
One interesting thing I noticed about the metadata is how fast an exposure the iPhone can take. The top photo is reportedly at 1/9500th of a second. The one just above is a 1/6000th. That’s pretty spiffy quick.
I find myself shooting a lot of these little 30 second clips of things. Life in motion. Simple scenes. So far, however, I remain fairly dissatisfied with uploading them to the web. So far I’ve played with Flickr, MobileMe, and now with YouTube. Still to come, I want to give Vimeo a shot. In any case, here’s a movie I shot and posted up to YouTube. You can compare it to the same movie uploaded to Flickr.
It seems that the codecs used to size things down on both YouTube and Flickr really hate the waves. At least YouTube has a higher quality option that seems to do quite a bit better. Of course, I guess I could just host the bits myself and shoot out QuickTime files.
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I used a third-party camera application for a while on my original (2G) iPhone - I can't find the details at the moment, but I suspect it was distributed through Cydia, hence for jail-broken phones only. That gave much more control over each exposure than the regular camera app (not difficult!) - I imagine there will be an equivalent for the 3GS soon.
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Great photos, but then I think people who've followed your work have come to expect that.
One thing I've noticed is that the iPhone 3G S (I can't speak for the previous model; perhaps it did the same?) inverts the usual rules of photography. Typically, aperture and shutter speed are fluid while ISO is fixed.
Recent DSLRs finally have auto ISO modes, so that the camera will shift in the usual doublings between ISO speeds, but the iPhone really uses ISO as a variable: from ISO 70 (which I assume is its minimum) through to whatever its maximum is, with a lack of quantisation that "proper" cameras eschew. (I've got values of 127, 253, 559, 581, 714 and 1016 in my library.)
It's probably not that interesting to most people, but I thought it was perhaps worth mentioning somewhere.
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Paul, I've noticed that too. :)
It's obvious that the lens is a fixed aperture, so exposure time and then ISO are the variables in the equation. The camera really wants to stick to an ISO of 70, but when it finally starts varying it, you end up with similar funky numbers. I've even seen an ISO of 74 at least a couple of times, strangely enough.
The previous iPhone didn't record all that much EXIF data. I'll have to dumpster dive into the old files sometime and see what's there.
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