Taking Photos on a Big. Important. Trip.

Taken with an iPhone 5 on our trip to San Francisco earlier this year. Most would be surprised by that, although anyone that we know who has suffered through looking at our seemingly endless gallery of iPhone pics would not be. Many of you have been most kind with your comments and ooohs-and-ahhhs at the right places, but we all knew there were/are limitations to iPhones. Zooming isn’t that great, shutter speed lags first-rate cameras so you tend to miss perfect shots, and you couldn’t really create professional images like you’d see a good photographer (like Lisa Kyle) take.

Unfortunately getting those features has meant carrying around a big, bulky digital SLR camera. Whereas, with an iPhone you just have it in your pocket. I’ve heard from a number of friends that they’ve begun to leave their dSLR cameras at home when they go on trips because they’re just too large or they get tired of lugging it around — they’ll just take a good point-and-shoot. We’ve just defaulted to carrying our iPhones because the only “better” cameras we’ve ever owned have been point-and-shoot. Quite honestly I do think iPhones are every bit as good as point-and-shoot cameras. Thus we’ve been left to that because we’re just aren’t going to carry big, bulky cameras. And if we aren’t going to carry them, what’s the point of having one? They say the best camera you have is the one that’s with you.

Getting back to the above pic, though. To me the most surprising thing about it is that I was able to edit the hell out of the picture directly on my iPhone. Among other things, it had people standing around on the plaza looking out at the ocean, and the horizon really wasn’t “blurred” like a photograph taken with a professional dSLR camera. Both effects were introduced on the iPhone with apps readily available to anyone. So while the iPhone may not take tremendous/professional/amazing photos to start with, it really does excel at editing. There is something great about being able to edit with your fingers, and iPhone app creators have done some amazing things with apps (see end of post for my recommendations).

But when you go on a Big. Important. Trip. you kinda wanna have a good camera with you, right? What to do, what to do? Big, bulky camera vs. handy iPhone. Super photos vs Good photos. Looking like a goober with a camera slung around your neck vs. slipping it into your pocket and melting into a crowd.

Just when I was about to give up and buy a small dSLR like a Canon Eos Rebel t3 or Nikon D5100 and go the goober route, Sony came to the rescue with their RX100-M2. Just look at this beauty:

The New York Times called it the “Best Pocket Camera Ever Made”, and professional photographers are even claiming that they are using this camera in place of some dSLRs.
Here are the specs:

• 1″ CMOS Sensor (largest available in a pocket camera)
• Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* lens
• Focal length 28mm-105mm
• Low-light ISO 6400 sensitivity
• 20.9 megapixel photo resolution
• Aperture f1.8-f4.9
• Optical zoom 3.6x, digital zoom up to 54x
• Image stabilizer
• Full 1080p HD video camera, 30fps
• Dimensions 4″ x 2 3/8″ x 1 7/16″ , weight 213g
• 3″ tilting LCD screen
• Built-in Wifi & NFC

Overall a lot of camera jammed into a really small package. Exactly what I wanted for this trip. The built in wifi will let me transfer selected photos to my iPhone for further editing, thus having the best of both worlds in one little package.
As you can imagine, this is not a cheap camera. But not one to let that stand in the way, I was hatching all sorts of crazy schemes to get the camera on the cheap, including sending harassing letters and emails to the CEO of Best Buy (sorry Hubert, I didn’t mean all that!). I synced every damn American Express card to Twitter and tweeted away to earn rebates and took advantage of every cash back offer I saw. Jeff has had to listen to me moan about this camera for weeks as I schemed to possess it.

So why am I writing about the camera now? Turns out a former colleague from Netjets is just leaving Sony for greener pastures and was able to order the camera for me through the Sony store at a substantial employee discount.
As they say in Istanbul, kismet, right? It arrives this week.

iPhone App Recommendations:

• Pro HDR. A terrific app for HDR photos. HDR means High-Dynamic Range imaging and is great for giving your photos some depth. HDR apps take two photos, one under-exposed and another over-exposed and then blends them together. There are a lot of HDR apps in the App Store, but this app does it the best.
• Dynamic Light. I love this app because it takes under-exposed photos and revives them quite nicely. Combined with an HDR photo and pics really pop.
• Camera Zoom. As I said in the main post, iPhone zooming is not great. This app improves on that, and it really does! Worth it for the occasional pic that needs a few more yards of zoom.
• PhotoFX. Wonderful and flexible app that provides you with some unique and interesting filters. I have yet to see another app with as many useful filters. Worth every cent.
• Tilt Shift Gen. This app miniaturizes stuff in that cool way that is popular these days. There are also a number of tilt shift apps, but this one is easy to use and provides excellent results.
• Retouch. This is the app I used to rub out all the people that were standing in the plaza in San Francisco. Don’t skip this app, it can edit as well as Photoshop, but is a lot easier to use and only $1.