Real cameras versus phone and tablet cameras

Photography – Real cameras vs tablet and phone cameras

It has often been said that the best camera is the camera that you have with you. It is because of this that the iPhone and the Android mobile phone cameras have been so popular for taking photos. So you could justifiably call them the best cameras. Apart from the fact that you have the ease of sharing the photographs that you can send off straightaway to photo sharing sites such as Flickr and 500PX, there is the simple fact that you just about always have your mobile device with you. It is so quick and easy just to whip it out and immediately snap that shot. The quality of the images that you get from these mobile devices is actually a very good, considering. You do have to take into consideration that the sensor on these mobile phone cameras is really very small indeed. Having said that, there are point-and-shoot cameras available now that have larger sensors but the images that you get are not much better than what you would get from an iPhone for example. This could partly be due to the fact that the research and development for photography is all going into the small mobile devices on one hand and then on the other hand the camera companies are pushing the changes into DSLR’s and mirrorless cameras. I have been using a DSLR camera for quite some years now and the latest one that I have is the Canon 600D. It is a marvellous camera and even though not as good as something like the professional full frame cameras that cost an arm and a leg to buy, you do get great results from it. Just bought a mirrorless camera to replace it, A Sony NEX-6 and I just love it. It is so light and small and in many ways better than the Canon.

Mobile phones – Fancy photos

You might say that to a certain extent much of the development in photography lately has been in the area of software particularly for mobile phone cameras. The software that you can use on your computers to work with the photographs that you have taken by whatever means. Then you have the software that is on the mobile devices which is doing amazing things on a tiny computer. Even the standard applications that come with the mobile phones for taking the photos give you a fair amount of options to give you the possibility of some interesting photographs. My personal favourite is on my Android phone which lets me take photographs that are like being inside a sphere. Then there are the applications which let you take Panoramic photos and these photos are just as easy to take as taking a simple straightforward snapshot.

Then you have the cloud applications which let you adjust the photographs that you have taken and sometimes it happens automatically. The Auto Awesome feature that is available within Google can on one hand take an ordinary photograph and turn it into something a whole lot better and on the other hand can add an effect that so many people are using that it becomes boring. The one that comes to mind at the moment is the auto awesome addition of falling snow to your photograph. It might look festive and it might also look silly when it looks like snow is falling inside a vehicle for instance. There are only so many of these photographs that you would like to see. Google bought a company that was well-known for photo manipulation software called SnapSeed and this has been utilised in enhancing photos that are automatically uploaded to the Google cloud.

Sharing the photo love

With Apple and iCloud you do have the advantage of the service called Photo Stream. I made a lot of use of this application when I was taking photos with an iPhone primarily, but now that I have Android devices the Photo Stream is not getting used quite so much. Instead my photos are going off to 2 places, first of all when I take photos with either my Nexus 7 or the Samsung Galaxy S3 the photos are going off automatically to Google+. Then I also have Dropbox running on the mobile devices and with this I have it set so that photographs are also uploaded into my Dropbox account at the same time. It is always good to have backups of your photos.

Cameras and mobile devices collaborating

There are cameras that now have Wi-Fi and indeed I have now got a camera that does do Wi-Fi. It is the Sony NEX 6 and you can use that Wi-Fi to connect directly to an access point and send photographs directly from the camera to various photo sharing sites. A more interesting collaboration of photography and mobile devices like phones and tablets is where you can connect a camera to a mobile device directly. There is the Sony camera lens, the QT10 which is wireless enabled in order to connect to your mobile device. It was made with connecting to the Sony mobile phones and tablets in particular, but it also does work with iPhones, and other Android devices. The images can be stored on this QT10 or QT 100, but they can also go to the mobile device. The mobile devices is also acting as the screen for viewing for taking the photograph, as well as being the recipient of the photo file so that you can work with it using the photography applications.

With the Sony NEX 6 there is the option where I can use my mobile device with free applications that I have installed on my iPhone, the iPad, the Nexus 7 and also the Galaxy S3. Now what I can do is to use this application to set up the photograph and also to press the button to take the photograph. I have a full-sized top-quality photograph saved on the camera and then a copy of the photograph is also sent to the mobile device. The smaller copy of the photograph that is on your phone or tablet can then be shared to the various photo sharing sites such as Flickr or 500PX. This way you are getting the best of both worlds and you can take the photographs from the camera to put onto your computer and deal with as you would normally in an application like Aperture for the Mac or iPhoto.