A quick praise for Apple

In my “About” section I also mention my photography gear. I am a devoted Nikonian and also have a “serious” Sony compact camera. When writing about me and my cameras it had never crossed my mind to mention my mobile phone…

I have had an iPhone 5s for a number of years (got a refurbished one at the time Apple had already had the iPhone 7 on the market). While I was always quite impressed with the quality of photos, I never really used it that much. The iPhone 5s has an 8 mega-Pixel camera, so not really something for larger prints. But still good enough to capture some memories… in situations where you don’t have your camera to hand.

What has really changed over the last few years is that Apple has included really quite powerful photo editing capabilities into the basic set of apps. I was never one to search for photo editing tools for my phone (Photoshop Express being the only notable exception that I have installed on my tablet, but not on the phone as I have limited storage space). The ability to adjust settings for brilliance, shadows & highlights, contrast, color contrast, saturation etc. is more than sufficient to bring out the best in your JPEG compressed photos.

Here a side-by-side comparison of original and edited picture (really not bad esp. considering that you are editing a jpeg image):

Above some examples from a recent trip to the German island of Sylt (had to pack for bad weather, carry-on only :(… ) and below some snapshots from Newcastle during a business trip (low light performance of the iPhone is really quite astonishing).