The point is (and note how short my original post was), that your OP seems to have an implicit premise, and you might want to consider whether that premise is valid or not, rather than bark at people who make such a suggestion.
Yes, I know that is your point. But no matter how diplomaticly you phrased “That’s a stupid question”, I still saw that you were saying “That’s a stupid question”. Well, to me it is a real, practical question about real things that I really have been doing for more than 20 years, and asked for a real practical purpose. So I’m politely asking you to stop with your unwanted threadshitting, which is what your posts really are
Well stated, so that’s the market and yours is the majority view.
I also do a large percentage of my photography outside at night, so the “torch” mode, with the LED light constantly on, is indispensable. Do modern stand-alones do that? Seriously asking–the stand-alones I had were in the xenon flash days, so no chance of that. Modern ones might have LEDs, though.
I was only able to use my old camera at night because it had “night vision” mode, with infrared LEDs built into the lens casing and a CCD not filtering IR out–it would allow me to compose in the dark with IR, then take a normal flash photo. But even though in some ways its 5 MP sensor still beats my 12 MP phone sensor, “torch mode” on the phone along with a 3rd app that gives me manual control of the camera, along with having the light very close to the lens (so no shadows of the lens barrel) leads to much more control of night shots on my $200 phone than I had on my $1000 stand-alone.
It’s not a threadshit; it was a genuine point and I was trying to be helpful.
If you really think it was a threadshit then go ahead and report me, but I don’t see why you’re seeing it that way.
“I think we can question the premise” doesn’t sound like “Why did you ask such a stupid question” to you?
No. But let’s be clear: no offense was intended.
Not to me. It’s worth exploring the differences between a macro image and a cropped non-macro image. As noted, there are differences in the depth of field. But really that’s just a result of the lens being significantly closer to the imager with a macro lens.
In much of normal photography, the subject is often beyond the hyperfocal distance, which means that everything from that distance out to infinity is in focus. Everything in the picture is nice and sharp, though that may not be what’s desired.
Macro photos are well inside the hyperfocal distance, and so instead you get a very narrow distance range where things are in focus. The closer you get, the worse this is, so the point where there may only be a few millimeters of sharp depth range.
But on the other hand, you’re using more area on the sensor and so it can collect more light. All else being equal, this will give you lower noise, which on a phone is extra important. Among other things, because they’re handheld, they can’t use long exposures to compensate.
Anyway, there are lots of tradeoffs to be made. I stand by my claim that the macro lenses on phones are often just gimmicks. But when implemented well, even at a lower resolution, they can do things that a normal camera cannot.
Okay, I accept that.
I’m basically wanting data towards my next phone purchase, and my goal is “photos pretty much like I’m getting now, but with more pixels.”
In my ideal photo I could zoom in on the spider’s eye and see my camera reflected, then zoom in on the camera lens and see the spider reflected…
That may be an assumption that the firmware/software designers make, but there is no problem to putting a cell phone on a tripod. I have several selfie sticks (bought for $1.00 each) where the clamp portion that holds the camera screws onto the stick portion with a standard mounting screw. I can and have used cell phones for video on my several normal tripods.
Also, while mine doesn’t allow long exposures (even with 3rd party apps) some phones do. Galaxy flagships allow exposures of up to 30 seconds and apparently Pixels can do four minutes.
(Back to my late Sony F707, it could do up to 30 seconds, but at 2.5 seconds and beyond, it would take a same-length “dark frame” and subtact that from the exposure in a lenghty calculation–so a 30 second shot would really take at least a minute and a half.)
The long exposures, at least on the Pixels, are to some extent simulated. They’re really taking a video and doing advanced image processing on it to stack the images together. Nothing wrong with this exactly, but it’s not quite the same thing as a true long exposure. As your link notes, they even have a specific sky detection neural net to alter the image to look better at the expense of realism.
Some of this fancy processing could be done for a macro mode, but it’s more difficult when the objects are so close. You can ignore parallax totally for stars, and nearly ignore it for a tree that’s 10 m away. But you can’t ignore it for a bug that’s a 10 cm away.
One thing is certain: cell phone cameras are moving very quickly in a good direction.
I have quite a bit of Fujifilm gear–cameras and prime lenses–and five years ago that’s all I would use for my photography, with my iPhone 5s used for selfies and pictures of whatever my wife wanted me to buy at the store.
Then when I bought the iPhone 7 with the dual camera, I noticed that for many photo opportunities my cell phone was good enough–it’s always in my pocket and always ready–and that’s a stodgy old iPhone 7.
Now that that phone has a dying lightning jack, I will soon be buying the new iPhone 13 Pro, and am really looking forward to all of the photo features that will keep me from lugging my gear around all over the place.
For comparison of close-up (not macro) photography, here are a couple of photos from my custom bass bridge project a few years back.
iPhone 7
Fujifilm 1
Fujifilm 2
It’s clear that the camera used for the latter two photographs had a much higher quality lens and better sensor, but the comparison is not the absolute mess it would have been with earlier phones. All three photos would hold their own side by side in a printed article or as part of a web page. Of course, all that changes when you zoom to full size on the two Fuji shots.
And it’s only going to get better!
To answer the question of “what’s the point of cell phone macro cameras?”, I don’t always have my cameras with me, but my phone is always there and always ready.
I haven’t done the math in detail but I believe you can get some trade off between DOF and pixels. I think it maxes out around an inch or so. Pixels per unit area of subject is inversely proportional to distance squared. DOF is a linear ratio between distance to subject and distance to hyperfocal point. So, if you back off from .5 inches to 2 inches you get 4 times the DOF (maybe .03" to .12") and 1/16th of the pixels. I have a DIY macro set up with a rack and pinion track for distance and an xy table for the subject. I’ve had a couple of good results that I attribute to this effect. But I don’t think it works beyond an inch or two. You lose pixels too fast.
So, an optimized macro system makes sense. In fact that’s what you jumping spider uses.
I took lots of photos over the years of Spotted Orb-weavers with my F707, but none could match the first two of these, taken in 2019 with a Galaxy J7 Crown, which sold for $99 through carriers. (The third photo, taken this year with a Motoroloa G6, is a little less detailed but I caught it in the rain.)
I assume it’s easier to make 2 cameras than one really flexible camera with macro focus capabilities, when the whole unit has to fit into 1/4" thickness or less. It’s easier to build that separate macro camera with the close focus and better depth of field built in. Plus, unlike a dedicated camera (unless you mean a real cheap model) the dedicated camera has much larger optics, and a larger sensor.
Who needs macro photography? I find it a lot easier for discerning detail, instead of carrying around different powers of reading glasses for that occasional use; take a pic of the super-fine-print instructions on a small box; I recently took a picture of the screws on the back of my Macbook Air to determine they were five-lobe heads. The law of unintended consequences. It’s become a magnifying glass. You can zoom the result after taking the picture.
The one time the camera failed me was trying to take a picture of a wayward pygmy mouse. I turned on the iPhone’s light and the little guy froze (he was nibbling his way through a plastic candy bag on a shelf in the pitch dark, very noisy) but when I went to take a picture, the camera first turned off the LED then refused to focus because it was pitch dark, so would not take a flash pic. …and my real camera was sitting on the other side of the room, battery out and charging. So after several tries, the little guy ran off while the light was out and I missed the shot. Sometimes “good enough” in camera design isn’t good enough.
Good point. It’s a handy utility.
Nope, that would be very good focusing for a macro shot, as Darren said. Most “macro photos” you see use the focus stacking technique he linked to.
And it’s a spinybacked orb weaver, not a tick. Lovely shot, @Darren_Garrison !
My Canon 5D doesn’t, although it’s a few years old now.
For me, a macro makes a big difference in my photography and is different than simply a crop of a larger photos. Your distance-to-subject will be different, thus giving a difference appearance of the relationship and relative distance of the foreground to the background. A macro exaggerates this distance, and makes isolation from background easier, and a crop of a larger photo compresses this distance. Also, the isolation of subject from background can be greater with a shallower depth of field (I like shallow depth of field as it makes the subject stand out against the background) and, perhaps most importantly, you just get a hell of a lot more detail from a 24MP macro shot than you do from a 24MP shot that has been cropped way the hell down.
It’s the same as with shooting with any lens and altering your distance-to-subject. Take a photo with a 50, then walk back 50 feet and take another photo, and crop down. The latter photo will appear to have “compressed” the distance of the foreground vs the background and, if you didn’t change your aperture, more will be in focus. For macro work, this may be desirable, but I prefer the look of macro photography with close distance-to-subject vs standing farther back.That said, when I do macro work, I find myself at f/8-f/16 as opposed to the usual f/2.8-f/4 in most of my non-landscape/environmental work.
But that’s the issue–it isn’t equal numbers of pixels on the sensors. On the phone I was looking at there is a 64 MP main camera and a 5 MP macro camera.
Yeah, that’s interesting. You’ll still have some differences vs cropping because of the closeness to subject, but that’s quite a difference in resolution. I’d have to play around with one to really get a sense of what the advantages are. It’s not something I’d foresee myself using much, if at all, but who knows. For me, in a phone camera, having a nice telephoto lens (doesn’t have to be crazy telephoto, just something equivalent to the 85-135 range in 35mm terms) is much more important, but all my phones so far have just had a singular lens (I’m only up to an iPhone 8.)