Yeah - I pretty much figure I take the best pictures the auto mode of my camera/phone lets me. Without flaunting my ignorance, ISTR lit acquaria are somewhat of an exception due to the brightness of the light, and the speed of the fish. Haven’t shot my aquaria lately, but I remember getting really good shots required a tripod and some manual settings. But yesterday I took some really good shots of my dog at the beach by simply pointing and clicking my phone.
Yup. The RE agent, if they’re serious, should spring for a pro to come by and shoot the house. Besides being tidy and with every single light on, most rooms need a two-shot pan, stitched together, to adequately show them. I still look over the pro shots of the house we sold in CA, because they’re beautiful shots of the years of work I did on the place. We sold, in early 2011, in a depressed area of Sacramento, in two weeks, for 95% of asking. The photos were not a trivial part of that success.
But even RE agents could learn to use their damned cell phones better.
Yes, but vision is horizontal.
Yes, but not that reason.
To make your videos bearable to watch.
No, but that’s because photo composition and video composition are entirely different beasts. I want my videos to be compatible with every single viewing medium they’ll ever be shown on. Shooting video vertically is counter-productive to that.
I bet almost none have autofocus. They all probably have simple fixed-focus lenses that have fairly high f numbers so that the depth of field is large, and most everything past a certain distance is in focus. A few do- the iPhone 3GS and higher apparently do have real mechanical auto-focus, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
Basically the best camera phones are roughly on par with low-end P&S cameras in terms of capability and photo quality. Mix that up with people taking photos in less than optimal conditions (indoors, bars/pubs, really close up, etc…) and you have a perfect recipe for cruddy photos.
Realtor here.
I heartily agree that better photos help sell upscale properties.
However, we are hamstrung by ancient technology – which I am constantly fighting against – that limits individual agents’ technology to bygone days. In our local MLS, we cannot post images any bigger than 640x480, and there is a data size limit as well. Posting larger ones won’t get them resized, just rejected.
And there are data purge batch routines that are also ancient, written in the days when a storage space for the entire local MLS was limited to 100 GB. Photos and other images are chopped off automatically without warning.
OTOH, we have brokers who specialize in foreclosures. While most brokers like to post 10-20 pix of a home, the foreclosure brokers post one or two at the most. For some trashed properties, posting a pic is probably a disincentive.
I agree. I shoot a lot of videos on my phone and I never want to view them again or save them to my computer so why should I care about some dipshit that might want to see it on any device other than my phone.
When I used film and got prints, I would shoot either in portrait or landscape. With digital I shoot landscape only because the display device is always my computer monitor, which can’t be turned easily like a print. Basically the problem is phones produce vertical videos optimized for phones, so it’s problematic to see it on a computer or a TV. I’ll go as far as to simply refuse to watch vertical videos unless the content is extremely compelling.
This. My first camera cell phone was 3 mp and you’d need a tripod to take a picture in bright light and it still sucked. My current one is 3.2 mp and it takes much better pictures in daylight but still is way below what the cheapest dedicated digital camera is capable of.
I was at Legoland, in the rain and heavy cloud cover and saw what is quite possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I grabbed my wife’s phone and snapped a shot, figuring it would turn out shit, but better than nothing.
Got home and put it on the computer, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look like an absolute professional photo-shoot.
Its so good, it almost looks faked, and kinda ruins the joke.
On the off chance your question was serious, I can tell you why I can’t use my cell phone camera with any success. It’s because of the focal length of my bifocal glasses, which are designed for distance or for reading but absolutely not for taking pictures on a cellphone. I can’t see the images on the cell phone at an appropriate distance to do anything but point and click and hope, and it will likely be jiggly because to see anything I have to hold it out at arm’s length with one hand, and so it jiggles. I can take excellent pictures on my I-pad because the device is large so I can hold it steady in two hands and the image is large so I can see what I’m doing.
The reader pane of your bifocals don’t let you see the display panel at something like normal reading distance? Mine do.
I’m an avid amature photographer. I own a decent dslr. When I try to take pictures with my cell phone they almost always suck.
I have a couple of good photos from my phone. taken of a reflction of buildings on the water. So they’re supposed to look blurry.
But all the times I try to just take of photo of something so I can look at it later, like a store front with the address so I can find it or something like that. Man, those photos suck.
Another reason they’re blurry is to hide the photoshop mistakes.
If you never want to view them again, then it makes no sense to put them on your phone in the first place.
As for only wanting to view them on your phone–guess what? We won’t know about those photos, so obviously we don’t care about them. We’re talking about videos posted online. Read for comprehension.
Am I correct in thinking that since phone camera sensors are small and cheap, ISO can’t be pushed much without awful noise and aperture isn’t that high, that leaves a long shutter speed to get sufficient exposure?
Long shutter speed + unstable platform=blur.
Also, are there are phone cameras which use anything better than digital stabilization?
From what I understand, digital stabilization works by taking two pictures and picking the least blurry of the two. If both are blurry because of long shutter speed, camera movement and not having any other form of stabilization, you’ll have blurry pictures no matter what, right?
In other words, most people suck at taking pictures with a cellphone for the same reason that most people suck shooting a handgun; it’s an unforgiving tool which sacrifices performance for portability.
I think true digital image stabilization is only for video. Video resolutions cap out at 1080P which is just over 2 megapixels, but a still camera has much, much more resolution. So the idea is you can select which part of the image sensor to use; if you jerk the camera up while videoing the active part of the image sensor shifts down to compensate.
Now YouTube needs to add a “horizontal only” filter for their searches.
Not sure if there are phones that do it, but one method is to take several short images instead of one long image, then stack them. With camera algorithms for HDR and panoramas that also require matching images, this method becomes easier.
That may be a software workaround in tinycams, but I have a case full of Canon lenses with IS that is active and mechanical. They work for both still and video photography.
Canon lenses use optical image stabilization, not digital.
That’s precisely what I said. 
Some of the bodies and most of the P&S models also have digital stabilization.