Tag: Reviews

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Photography Reviews Writing

An Amateur Photographer’s Mid-Term Review of the Leica Q2

Black-and-white street crowd at Yonge–Dundas; older woman adjusting hood, masked pedestrians, large bank ad billboard behind.”
(Yonge & Dundas, Toronto, 2024)

I’m an amateur Toronto-based documentary and street photographer, and have been making images on the street for over a decade. In the fall of 2023 I purchased a used Leica Q2. I’d wanted the camera for a while, but it wasn’t until late 2023 that I began running into situations where I’d benefit from a full-frame sensor. Since then I’ve been going out and making images with it at least once a week for hours at a time and have made tens of thousands of frames in all kinds of weather.

In this post I discuss my experiences using the Leica Q2 in a variety of weather conditions to make monochromatic JPG images. I tend to exclusively use either single-point autofocus or zone focusing, and either multi-field or highlight-weighted exposure modes, generally while using aperture priority at 1/500s to freeze action on the street. My edits to images have, previously, used Apple Photos and now rely on the Darkroom app on my iPad Pro. You can see the kinds of images that I’ve been making on my Glass profile.

Layered walkway with a lone silhouette in the windows, city skyline with cranes, deep noon shadows, large tree at left.
Crescent & Cluny, Toronto, 2024

Before I get into the review it’s worth being clear what I’m not reviewing. I am not undertaking a technical sensor analysis, evaluating the Q2’s RAW flexibility, or assessing its colour rendering because I exclusively make monochromatic JPGs. There are lots of reviewers who have covered off those areas and I’d encourage you to check them out for a wider assessment of the Q2’s abilities.

TLDR: I really like this camera and it’s good for the specific uses that I have for it. However, I generally wouldn’t recommend it (or other Leica Q-series cameras) to most people because they can get most of the Q2’s benefits at a fraction of the cost.

Why I chose the Q2

I previously used a Fuji X100F for many years. It’s a great camera but I had started to run into challenges when making images into the night during the fall and winter seasons; it just couldn’t capture images quickly enough to effectively freeze action, even when shot wide open at f/2.0. I wanted to continue using a rangefinder-style camera, a fixed lens to keep things simple, a full-frame sensor to collect more light, and also wanted weather sealing to give me some peace of mind for when I had the camera out in rain and snow.

Backlit children and families moving through mist on a waterfront plaza; condo towers in silhouette; bird flying overhead.
Great Lakes Waterfront Trail, Toronto, 2024

This didn’t leave a lot of options! I ultimately selected the ‘regular’ Q2 because at the time I waffled on whether I’d ever want to be able to make colour images (I haven’t) and because the Q2 Monochrom tended to sell for about $1,500 (CAD) more. That pushed the cost of the Monochrom over $8,000 from reputable online sellers, and the price point was a bit too rich for my blood.

How the Q2 handles in practice

Day to day, the Q2 is intuitive. The menus make sense, the body feels excellent in the hand, and it encourages steady handheld shooting. The button placement largely aligns with how I work, though I do wish I could assign one control specifically for exposure lock such as by remapping the crop button that I never use (save for when pressed accidentally with gloves).

Low-angle view of ornate swing ride in motion; riders suspended mid-air, hair streaming; open sky backdrop.
Ontario & Princess, Toronto, 2024

In Toronto’s spring, summer, and fall the Q2 never overheats and handles seasonal rain showers with no issues. Even after taking it to windy beaches I don’t have any dust on the sensor. Negatively, the strap lugs can be slightly abrasive against my index finger depending on how I’m holding the camera. Also, on the hottest summer days when the humidex pushes temperature to 40 °C or more I perspire a lot, which can sometimes cause the camera body to get a bit slippery in my hands.

Skaters at Nathan Phillips Square under a lit arch; ‘TORONTO’ sign and towers at night; one skater down on the ice.
Bay & Queen, Toronto, 2025

Winter is a bit different. The Q2 is an all-metal body. In winter I add the Leica leather half-case because the body gets cold quickly, and I also wear gloves and attach a thumb grip. The Leica thumb grip (purchased used on eBay!) is really helpful to stabilize the camera because the camera’s indented thumb rest just isn’t sufficient in that situation. I’ve had no issues using the camera in the snow, including heavy snowfalls. I carry two batteries with me during the winter but it’s pretty rare that I need the second one save for particularly long walks on exceedingly cold days. 1

Living at 28mm on full frame

Whereas once I saw in 35mm (equivalent) with the Fuji X100F, now I see in the 28mm of the Leica Q2. I really like fixed lenses because they let me immediately pre-visualize scenes and I know exactly where I need to be to make certain images.

While there was a learning period with the Q2 — I just had to get closer to my subjects! — at this point I have an instinctive understanding of what the Q2 ‘sees’ before even raising the camera. 28mm is a relatively wide focal length and so I’m careful to check the edges of my frame before making an image to ensure that I don’t have unnecessary extras lingering on the outskirts of the frame. The sensor produces huge 47-megapixel images which gives me cropping flexibility, though I try to mostly compose in-camera.

Two pedestrians in bright midday sun pass the ‘La Canadienne’ storefront; hard shadows and high contrast.
Cumberland & Bellair, Toronto, 2025

The full-frame sensor is a huge benefit to me and how I make images. I prefer working at 1/500s and let my ISO roam as high as 6400. The Q2 lets me have this and, also, a relatively narrow aperture to capture depth across the scene. And, in the depths of fall and winter when night arrives somewhat early, it’s super helpful to be able to open the lens as wide as f/1.7. While I don’t tend to shoot a lot of images at this aperture I really do appreciate the option and will use it during the evenings, as well as in low-lit indoor locations. The combination of the sensor and terrific lens means that I’m rarely prevented from making an image in any given situation.

Learning curve, tips, and a few warnings

Coming to the Leica Q2 from the X100F felt like a natural progression. Widening from a 35mm-equivalent to 28mm pushed me to get a little closer, but I was already comfortable working near my subjects, so the adaptation was more about refining habits than learning new ones. What I do miss from the Fuji system are the recipes; Fuji’s approach to in-camera JPG looks is brilliant and the Q2 doesn’t offer anything comparable. I understand Leica added more styles on the Q3, but on the Q2 those options are extremely limited to slight modifications of contrast, highlight, shadow, and sharpness.2

Fast carnival ride at the CNE; riders blur as the car sweeps past the entrance and height board; dynamic motion.
Nunavut & Princess (CNE Fairground), Toronto, 2025

In my experience, the camera also has a real tendency to blow out highlights and can be inconsistent with white balance. If you shoot RAW that’s more of an inconvenience than a problem, but as a JPG shooter it can be frustrating. That said, I am often able to reduce the blowouts by using highlight-weighted metering. This metering mode helps me protect bright areas while allowing deep shadows in my images.

Snowy corner scene with tilted EXIT sign, abandoned shopping cart, falling snow; bundled pedestrians in slush.
Yonge & Gould, Toronto, 2025

The single-point autofocus is reliable and I rarely have issues focusing on a subject or pre-focusing on an area where I expect people to pass. The zone-focusing scale could use finer spacing—the 2m to ∞ gap feels too compressed—and it’s too easy to accidentally nudge the focus ring if I brush against it. A bit more resistance on the ring would reduce the chance of the zone shifting accidentally and costing me a shot.

The other reality of the Q2 is its weight. This is a heavy camera! I carry it in my hand, tethered with a Peak Design Leash, for four to eight hours at a stretch on photowalk days. I’m used to it but whenever I grab my X100F or a Ricoh GR IIIx for a short walk, I’m reminded of how substantial the Leica really is.

Has the Q2 improved my street photography?

No, not really.

The improvements I’ve seen come from being out and making images. The Q2’s full-frame sensor and weather sealing removed some frictions that I’d experienced but they didn’t magically transform either my eye or the calibre of images that I’ve been making. It’s the hundreds of hours put into walking the streets, reviewing images, studying photobooks, and learning from YouTube (and applying those learnings in practice) that have benefitted my images. I have no doubt that if I’d just kept using my Fuji I would also be a better photographer today than I was the day I purchased my Leica.

Night street under ‘The Grand Gerrard’ marquee; woman and child walk past a row of bins on a snowy sidewalk.
Gerrard & Galt, Toronto, 2024

I will say, however, that the switch didn’t significantly set me back: because I was so used to the 35mm (equivalent) focal length, and the Leica pares away most of the options in contemporary cameras, that it was quick to learn. I suspect that wouldn’t have been the case if I’d tried switching to a camera system with more baroque or confusing menus or features, or shifted to a radically different focal length.

Likes, dislikes, and the small things that matter

One of the intangibles is that the Q2 is beautiful. I live in a small home and it’s on display so I pass it, and appreciate it, several times every day.

A small but meaningful quality-of-life detail is the battery mechanism that holds the battery in place until you push to release it. It’s a very small thing but it’s one that I appreciate each time I need to charge a battery.

Fishmonger in apron seated at a sidewalk table beneath the ‘Coral Sea Fish’ awning; strong side light, Kensington Market.
Baldwin & Augusta, Toronto, 2024

The Q2 does lack a flip screen though that hasn’t been a practical problem for me. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable this past year zone focusing; between that and my familiarity with what the 28mm lens will ‘see’ I can reliably get low-angle images without a tilting back screen.

I can confirm what some reviewers have found, that the EVF and the rear screen don’t always match in brightness/tonal presentation, which makes it hard to use them interchangeably when setting exposure for monochromatic images. I recommend committing to one viewing method and letting your eye calibrate to it.

Crowded Yonge–King subway stairs divided by a pole with a QR sticker; commuters in hard light and deep shadow.
Yonge & King, Toronto, 2025

It’s worth recognizing that file sizes on the Q2 are big, especially once you start aggregating thousands of images. Regarding image formats, JPEG XL has been getting more attention lately for its compression efficiency, improved dynamic range as compared with JPG images, and future proofing around data storage. The Q2 was released before this format began to see adoption, so I don’t fault Leica for leaving it out. However, whenever I do upgrade I’d definitely want my next camera to support it.

Would I recommend the Q2 to other street photographers?

In most cases, no.

I bought this camera for very specific reasons: I wanted a full-frame sensor, weather sealing, and a fixed lens with a wide aperture. Very few cameras meet that combination and most photographers don’t truly ‘need’ all three at once. If you can compromise on one or more of those requirements, there are fixed-lens cameras and interchangeable-lens systems that offer better flexibility and value. And I’d note that I wasn’t exactly kind to my Fuji X100F — it went out and got wet in light rain and snow, and was exposed to extreme temperatures and dust — so even non-weather sealed systems can survive a lot more than we tend to credit them for!

Low-angle street portrait of a woman in sunglasses striding past a curved object in the foreground; brick facade and bare branches overhead
Queen & Spadina, Toronto, 2025

As for the “Leica look,” I don’t have much to say. I honestly don’t really know what it means after making images on the Q2 for a few years. Of course, I’m not editing RAW images, nor using advanced Photoshop features, but that’s largely because I only have so much time and I’d rather be making images on the streets than designing them at home in Photoshop or other editing software.

In Summary

Ultimately, if you want a supremely reliable camera that will hold up for years, you’re comfortable with a fixed 28mm and being physically close to your subjects, and you accept the Leica premium, then I think you’d be pretty happy owning a Leica Q2. Of course that’s a very, very narrow audience but it’s one that I happen to inhabit.

Sunlit view of a modernist civic building; empty sweeping street and crosswalk; one pedestrian walking with luggage towards the edge of the frame.
Chestnut & Armour, Toronto, 2025

I’m very glad I bought mine, I’ve used it a lot, and I’m nowhere near its technical or artistic limits. I expect to get many, many, many more years of use out of it before I’m even tempted to upgrade to a new camera.

  1. As a pro tip: if you’re buying a second battery for the Q2 make sure you get one that fits in the Q3 — it’s the same size but has significantly more capacity, and is officially supported in the Q2 series of cameras. You can even charge it using the Q2’s own charger! ↩︎
  2. See Phil Clark’s assessment for how minor these adjustments are when applied to native JPGs produced by the Leica Q2. ↩︎
Categories
Photography Writing

Best Photography-Related Stuff of 2023

Bay & King, Toronto, 2023

There are lots of ‘best of’ lists that are going around. Instead of outlining the best things that I’ve purchased or used over the year I wanted to add a thematic: what was the best ‘photography stuff’ that I used, read, watched, or subscribed to over the course of 2023?

Photography Stuff I Used

Best Technology of 2023

90-95% of the photographs that I made over the year were with the Fuji X100F. It’s a spectacular camera system; I really like how small, light, and versatile it is. I created a set of recipes early summer and really think that I dialled in how to use them and, also, how to apply my very minimal editing process to the images. I’m at the point with this camera that I can use it without looking at a single dial, and I know the location of every setting in the camera that I regularly use.

I do most of my writing on my well-used iPad Pro 11” (2018). It’s a great device that is enough for 99% of my needs.1 However, I have to admit that I’ve long missed owning an iPad Mini because they’re so small and light and portable. I do pretty well all of my reading on the iPad Mini these days. My partner purchased me one this year and I’ve fallen in love with it again. I’m using it everyday for an hour or more, and ultimately I now pull out the iPad Pro 11” just when I need to do longer-form writing.

Finally, though I haven’t had it all that long, I really do enjoy the Leica Q2. I’m still getting used to the 28mm focal length but deeply appreciate how I can now shoot in bad weather and low light.2 The in-camera stabilization is also letting me experiment with novel slow shutter speeds. I remain excited, however, for what it’ll be like to use the camera when I haven’t been in persistent cloud cover!

Best Services I Paid For

I have kept using Glass each and every day. Does it (still) have problems with its AI search? Yes. Does it have the best photographic community I’ve come across? Also yes. You should subscribe if you really love photography and want to contribute to a positive circle of practice. And if you’re watching a lot of photography-related materials on YouTube I cannot recommend a Premium subscription highly enough!

I also am deeply invested in Apple’s services and pay for Apple One. This gives me access to some things that I care about, including a large amount of cloud storage, News, customized email, Apple Music, and Apple TV. I find the current costs to be more than a little offensive–Apple’s decision to raise costs without increasing the benefits of the service was particularly shitty–but I’m deeply invested in Apple’s ecosystem–especially for storing my photographs!–and so will continue to pay Apple’s service tax.

Best Apps

I use lots of apps but the best ones I rely on for photography include:

  • Podcasts App to listen to the different podcasts to which I’ve subscribed.
  • Reeder for staying on top of the different blogs/websites I’m interested in reading.
  • Glass to look at, comment on, and reflect on photographers’ images.
  • Geotags Photos Pro and Geotags Photo Tagger. I’ve set the former app to record my geolocation every 5 minutes when I’m out making images and the latter to then apply geotags to the photographs I keep from an outing.3

Stuff I Read

Best Photography Books

Most of the non-fiction books that I read throughout the year were focused around photography. The two best books which continue to stand out are:

  • Bystander: A History of Street Photography. This book does an amazing job explaining how (and why) street photography has developed over the past 150 years. I cannot express what a terrific resource this is for someone who wants to understand what street photography can be and has been.
  • Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective. This book is important for all photographers who are interested in monochromatic images because it really explains why, and how, Moriyama made his classic images. It reveals why he made his gritty black and white images and, also, why some of the equivalent ‘recipes’ the mimic this kind of image-making may run counter to his whole philosophy of image making.

Stuff I Watched

Best Movies

The best photography-related movies that I watched were all classics. They included Bill Cunningham: New York; Gary Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable; The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith; and Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York. Combined with written history and photo books they helped to (further) reinforce my understanding of how and why street photographers have made images.

Best YouTube Channels

I watch a lot of photography YouTube. The channels I learn the most from include those run by James Popsys, Tatiana Hopper, EYExplore, Alan Schaller, Pauline B, aows, Aperture, and Framelines. My preference is for channels that either provide POV or discuss the rationales for why and how different images are being (or have been) made.4

Stuff I Subscribed To

Best Podcasts

I tend to listen to photography podcasts on the weekend when I go out for my weekly photowalks. The two that I listen to each and every week are The Photowalk and The Extra Mile. It’s gotten to the point that it almost feels like Neale James (the host of the podcasts) is walking along with me while I’m rambling around taking photos.

Aside from those, I’ll often listen to A Small Voice or The Candid Frame. These are interviews with photographers and I regularly learn something new or novel from each of the interviews.

Best Blogs/RSS Feeds

For the past year I’ve trimmed and managed the number of my RSS feeds. I keep loving the work by Craig Mod, Little Big Traveling Camera,5 and Adrianna Tan’. They all do just amazing photoessays and I learn a tremendous amount from each of them in their posts.

Biggest Disappointments

I somehow managed to break the hood that I’d had attached to my Fuji X100F in the fall and decided to get what seemed like a cool square hood to replace it. It was a really, really bad idea: the hood was a pain to screw on so that it wasn’t misaligned and, once it was aligned, was on so tight that it was very hard to remove. I would avoid this particular hood like the plague.

I also bought a Ricoh GR IIIx and while it’s a fantastic camera I just haven’t used it that much. I didn’t take as many images with it as I’d hoped when I was walking to or from work, and really ended up just using it when I needed to go out and take photos in the rain (I kept it safely hidden under my umbrella). Also, the camera periodically just fails to start up and requires me to pull the battery to reset it. Is it a bad camera? Nope, not at all, and I did manage to capture some images I was happy with enough to submit to Ricoh’s photography contest. But it’s not a camera that I’ve really fallen in love with.

Finally, while I use my AirPods Pro all the time I really don’t like them because I cannot get them to stay in my ears unless I purchase third-party foam tips. And I need to keep purchasing new sets of tips because they wear out after a couple of months. Are they good headphones once they stay in my ears? Yes. But the only way to accomplish that is becoming increasingly costly and that’s frustrating.

Conclusion

Anyhow, that’s my list of the ‘best photography-related stuff’ I’ve used in the course of 2023. What was your top stuff of the year?

  1. I really do want to get a new iPad 11” and will do so once they update the screen. I edit pretty well all of my photos on the iPad Pro and an updated screen (and battery…) would be lovely. ↩︎
  2. There is a caveat that I’ve found: the electronic shutter is absolute garbage for shooting at dusk/in the dark with LED lights. And I think the single-use exposure dial on the Fuji X100F is preferable to the configurable dial on the Q2. ↩︎
  3. You can set the app to record your location more regularly but I’ve found this to be a good balance between getting geolocation information and preserving my phone’s battery life. ↩︎
  4. If you watch a lot of YouTube then I recommend that you pay for a YouTube Premium subscription. You’ll cut out the frustrating advertising that otherwise intrudes into the videos. ↩︎
  5. I think that this is perhaps the single best photography blog that I’ve found. I aspire to this level of excellence and regularity of updates! ↩︎
Categories
Photo Essay Photography Writing

Which Photo (Or Three…) Best Represents 2022?

‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part | Excluded Audience | Amour by Christopher Parsons

Neale James, host of the Photowalk, challenged the ‘Extra Milers’ to look through our pictures and find one (or three…) which really spoke to our 2022. It could be a best photograph, or one that captures some memory or another, or really anything…the question was deliberately left pretty open to interpretation.

It served as a good experience for me. I went back through the past 11 months of images and, in the process, was reminded of numerous photos and experiences I’d forgotten about.

The first image (“‘til Pandemic Does Us Part”) speaks to how seriously some were still taking the pandemic much earlier in the year.

‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part by Christopher Parsons

The second (“Excluded Audience”) is very similar to an image I made in early 2020 which defined that stage of the pandemic in Toronto for me. “Excluded Audience” is meant to call back to that image and showcase that while things were going back to normal as the year progressed, that normal isn’t necessarily positive for everyone in the city. I’ve also included that reference image (“Down But Not Out”) below, after the set, just to indicate what I was trying to call back to.

Excluded Audience by Christopher Parsons

The final image of the year in this set (“Amour”) is meant to document how things are, today, with those in love able to see and hold one another amongst crowds once more. As a set, I think they have a symmetry in story and composition across them.

Amour by Christopher Parsons

And, finally, the reference image really just captures what Toronto was like in the early days of the pandemic when the entire downtown core had just shut down in its entirety.

Down But Not Out by Christopher Parsons

In terms of process for selecting photos, most years I start by reviewing images that I posted to social media that year, which in 2022 has been Glass. From the 300-365 images I work down to 30 images or so that best tell the story of the year. However, using this process I miss some photos that I really like but haven’t uploaded and, at the same time, include some images in the sort that I’ve somewhat fallen out of favour with since posting them.

All of which is to say: I think that going through and taking the time to review/re-examine all the images we’ve taken over a year is a splendid exercise, and especially because there’s a bit of time between when an image was captured and now. For me, at least, this helped to surface work that resonates more today than I think that it did when I first made it.

How do you go through and review your photos annually? What’s your best photo or photo set of the year, and what’s the story behind them?

Categories
Photography Reviews Writing

Glass 365 Days Later

Wintertime Rush

(Wintertime Rush by Christopher Parsons)

I’ve been actively using Glass for about a full year now. Glass is a photo sharing site where users must pay either a monthly or yearly fee; it costs to post but viewing is free.

I publish a photo almost every day and I regularly go through the community to view other folks’ photos and comment on them. In this short review I want to identify what’s great about the service, what’s so-so, and where there’s still room to grow. All the images in this blog post were previously posted to Glass.

Let me cut to the chase: I like the service and have resubscribed for another full year.

The Good

The iOS mobile client was great at launch and it remains terrific. It’s fast and easy to use, and beats all the other social platforms’ apps that I’ve used because it is so simple and functional. You can’t edit your images in the Glass app and I’m entirely fine with that.

(Fix, Found by Christopher Parsons)

The community is delightful from my perspective. The comments I get are all thoughtful and the requirement to pay-to-post means that there aren’t (yet) any trolls that I’ve come across. Does this mean the community is smaller? Definitely. But is it a more committed and friendly community? You bet. Give me quality over quantity any day of the week.

All subscribers have the option to have a public facing profile, which anyone can view, or ones that are restricted to just other subscribers. I find the public profiles to be pretty attractive and good at arranging photos, especially when accessing a profile on a wide-screen device (e.g. a laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone in landscape).

The platform launched as iPhone only, to start, though has been expanding since then. The iPad client is a joy to use and the developers have an Android client on their roadmap. A Windows application is available and you can use the service on the web too.

(Birthday Pose by Christopher Parsons)

Other things that I really appreciate: Glass has a terrifically responsive development team. There are about 50 community requests that have been implemented since launch; while some are just for bugs, most are for updates to the platform. Glass is also the opposite of the traditional roach-motel social media platform. You can download your photos from the site at any time; you’re paying for the service, not for surveillance. That’s great!

The So-So

So is Glass perfect then? No. It has only a small handful of developers as compared to competitors like Instagram or Vero which means that some overdue features are still in development.

(‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part by Christopher Parsons)

A core critique is there is no Android application. That’s fair! However, iOS users are more likely to spend money on apps so it made economic sense to prioritize that user base.1 Fortunately an Android application is on its way and a Windows version was recently released.

A more serious issue for existing users is an inability to ‘tag’ photos. While photos can be assigned to categories in the application (and more categories have been added over time) that means it’s hard to have the customization of bigger sites like Flickr. The result is that discovery is more challenging and it’s harder to build up a set of metadata that could be used in the future for presenting photos. Glass, currently, is meant to provide a linear feed of photos—that’s part of its charm!—but more sophisticated methods of even displaying images on users’ portfolios in the future may require the company to adopt a tagging system. Why does it matter that there is or isn’t one, today? Because for heavier users2 re-viewing and tagging all photos will be a royal pain in the butt, if that ever is something that is integrated into the platform.

(Tall and Proud by Christopher Parsons)

If you’re looking to use Glass as a formal portfolio, well, there are almost certainly better services and platforms you should rely upon. Which is to say: the platform does not let you create albums or pin certain photos to the top of your profile. I entirely get that the developers are aiming for a simple service at launch, but would also appreciate the ability to better categorize some of my photos. In particular, I would like to create things such as:

  • Best of a given year
  • Having albums that break up street versus landscape versus cityscape images
  • Being able to create albums for specific events, such as particular vacations or documentary events
  • Photos that I generally think are amongst my ‘best’ overall

This being said, albums and portfolios are in the planning stages. I look forward to seeing what is ultimately released.

(Public Praise by Christopher Parsons)

As much as I like the community as it stands today, I would really like the developers to add some small or basic things. Like threaded comments. They’re coming, at some point, after discovery features are integrated (e.g., search by location, by camera, etc.). Still, as it stands today, the lack of even 2-levels of threaded comments means that active conversations are annoying to follow.

Finally, Glass is really what you make of it. If you’re a photographer who wants to just add photos and never engage with the community then I’d imagine it’s not as good as a platform such as Instagram or Vero. Both of the latter apps have larger user bases and you’re more likely to get the equivalent of a like; I don’t know how large Glass’ user-base is but it’s not huge despite being much larger than at launch. However, if you’re active in the community then I think that you can get more positive, or helpful, feedback than on other platforms. At least for me, as a very enthusiastic amateur photographer, the engagement I get on Glass is remarkably more meaningful than on any other platform on which I’ve shared my photographs.

The Bad

Honestly, the worst part about Glass is still discoverability.3 You can see a semi-random set of photographers using the service which isn’t bad…except that some of them may not have posted anything to the platform for months or even a year. I have no idea why this is the case.

(Stephanie by Christopher Parsons)

The only other way to discover other photographers is to regularly dig through the different photography categories, and ‘appreciate’4 photos you see and follow the photographers who appeal to your tastes. This isn’t terrible, but it’s the ‘best’ way of discovering photos and really isn’t great. While the company ‘highlights’ photographers on the Glass website and through its Twitter feed, the equivalent curation still doesn’t exist in the application itself. That’s non-ideal.

The developers have promised that additional discovery functions will be rolling out. They intend enable search by camera type or location, but thus far nothing’s been released. They’ve been good at slowly and deliberately releasing features, and new features have always been thoughtful when implemented, so I’m hopeful that when discoverability is updated it’ll be pretty good. Until then, however, it’s frankly pretty bad.

(Lonely Traveller by Christopher Parsons)

If I were to find a second thing that’s missing, to date, it would be that there’s no way of embedding Glass images in other CMSes. The platform does support RSS, which I appreciate, but I want the platform to offer full-on embeds so I can easily cross post images to other web spaces (like this blog!). Embeds could, also, have some language/links that ultimately let viewers sign up for the service as a way of growing the subscriber base.

The third thing that I wish Glass would enable a way of assessing if a photo has already been uploaded. At this point I’ve uploaded over 300 photos and I want to ensure that I don’t accidentally upload a duplicate. This is definitely a problem associated with those who use the service more heavily, but will become a more prominent issue as users ‘live’ on the platform for more and more years.

Conclusion

So, at the end of a year, what do I think of Glass?

First, I think that it truly is a photography community for photographers. It isn’t trying to be a broader social network that lets you share what music you’re listening to, or TV shows and movies you’re watching, or books you’ve finished, or temporary stories or images. There is totally a space for a network like that but it’s not Glass and I’m fine with it being a simpler and more direct kind of platform.

(Night Light by Christopher Parsons)

Second, it is a platform with active developers and a friendly community. Both of those things are pretty great. And the developers have a clear and opinionated sense of taste: they’re creating a beautiful application and associated service. There’s real value in the aesthetic for me.

Third, it’s not quite the place to showcase your work, today, if you are trying to semi-professionally market your photography. There are no albums or other ways of highlighting or collecting your images. Glass is much closer to the original version of Instagram in just presenting a feed of historical images instead of a contemporary service like Flickr or even Instagram. And…that’s actually a pretty great thing! That said, the roadmap includes commitments to enabling better highlighting/collecting of images. This will be increasingly important as more people upload more photographs to the service.

(Supervisory Assistance by Christopher Parsons)

Fourth, it’s still relatively cheap as compared to other paid offerings. It is less than half the cost of a Flickr Pro account, as just one example. And there are no ads for subscribers or for individuals who are browsing public profiles and associated portfolios.

(Distressed by Christopher Parsons)

So, in conclusion, I’d strongly suggest trying out Glass if you’re a committed and enthusiastic amateur. It’s not the same as Instagram or Instagram clones. That’s both part of the point and part of the magic of the platform that the Glass team is creating and incubating.

  1. Yes, you might be willing to pay money, dear reader, but you’re statistically deviant. In a good way! ↩︎
  2. Such as myself… ↩︎
  3. The developers are, also, very well aware of this issue. ↩︎
  4. Glass does not have ‘likes’ per se, but lets users click an ‘appreciation’ button. Appreciations are only ever sent to the photographer and are not accumulated numerically to be presented to either the public or the photographer who uploaded the photograph. ↩︎
Categories
Aside Photography Reviews

2022.9.18

A couple thoughts after shooting with the iPhone 14 Pro for a day, as an amateur photographer coming from an iPhone 12 Pro and who also uses a Ricoh GR and Fuji X100F.

  1. The 48 megapixel 24mm (equiv.) lens is nearly useless for street photography, when capturing images at 48 megapixels. It takes 1+ seconds to capture an image at this resolution. That’s not great for trying to catch a subject or scene at just the right moment. (To me, this says very, very bad things about what Apple Silicon can actually do.) Set the captured resolution to 12 megapixels in ProRAW if you’re shooting fast-moving or fast-changing subjects/scenes.
  2. The 78mm (equiv.) telephoto is pretty great. It really opens a new way of seeing the world for me. I also think it’s great for starting street photographers who aren’t comfortable being as close as 28mm or 35mm might require.
  3. The new form factor means the MagSafe-compatible battery I use doesn’t fit. Which was a pretty big surprise and leads into item 4…
  4. Capturing 48 megapixel images, at full resolution, while using your phone in bright daylight (and thus raising the screen to full brightness), absolutely destroys battery life. Which means you’re likely to need a battery pack to charge your phone during extended photoshoots. Make sure you choose one that’s the right size!
  5. I like the ability to use the photographic styles. But it really sucks that you can’t see what effect they’d have on monochrome/black and white images. I shoot 95-99% in monochrome; this is likely less of an issue for other folks.
  6. The camera app desperately needs an update and reorganization. It is kludgy and a pain in the ass to use if you need to change settings quickly on the street. Do. Not. Like. It’s embarrassing Apple continues to ship such a poor application.

I haven’t taken the phone out to shoot extensively at night, though some staged shots at home at night showcase how much better night mode is compared to that in the iPhone 12 Pro.

Anyway, early thoughts. More complete ones will follow in the coming week or so.

Categories
Photography Reviews

An Amateur Photographer’s Long-Term Review of the iPhone 12 Pro Camera System

I bought an iPhone 12 Pro mid-cycle in March 2021 and have been shooting with it for the past several months in a variety of weather conditions. I was very pleased with the iPhone 11 Pro with the exception of the green lens flares that too-frequently erupt when shooting with it at night. Consider this a longish-term review of the 12 Pro with comparisons to the 11 Pro, and scattered with photos taken exclusively with the 12 Pro and edited in Apple Photos and Darkroom on iOS.

Background

I’m by definition an amateur photographer; I shoot using my iPhone as well as a Fuji X100F, and get out to take photos at least once or twice a week during photo walks that last a few hours. I don’t earn any money from making photos and shoot with it for my own personal enjoyment. Most of my photos are street or urban photography, with a smattering of landscape shots and photos of friends and family thrown in.

To be clear up front: this is not a review of the iPhone 12 Pro, proper, but just the camera system. This said, it’s worth noting that the hardware differences between the iPhone 11 Pro and 12 Pro are pretty minor. The 26mm lens is now f/1.6 and the 13mm can be used with night mode. At a software level, the 12 Pro introduced the ability to shoot Apple ProRAW and introduced Smart HDR 3, as well as Deep Fusion to improve photographic results in low to middling light. Deep Fusion, in particular, has no discernible effect on the shots I take, but maybe I’m just not pixel peeping enough to see what it’s doing.

For the past few years I’ve shot with a number of cameras, including: an iPhone 6 and 7, and 11 Pro, a Fuji X100 and 100F, a Sony RX1002, and an Olympus EM10ii. I’ve printed my work in a couple personal books, and also printed photos from all these systems at various sizes and hang the results on my walls. When I travel it’s with a camera or two in tow. If you want a rough gauge of the kinds of photos I take you might want to take a gander at my Instagram.

Also, while I own a bunch of cameras, photos are my jam. I’ll be focusing mostly on how well the iPhone 12 Pro makes images with a small aside to talk about its video capabilities. For more in-depth technical reviews of the 12 Pro I’d suggest checking out Halide’s blog.

The Body

The iPhone 11 Pro had a great camera system but it was always a bit awkward to hold the phone when shooting because of its rounded edges. Don’t get me wrong, it helped the phone feel more inviting than the 12 Pro but was less ideal for actual daily photography and I find it easier to get, and retain, a strong grip on the 12 Pro. Your mileage may vary.

I kept my 11 Pro in an Apple silicon case and I do the same for the 12 Pro. One of the things I do with some regularity is press my phone right against glass to reduce glare when I’m shooting through a window or other transparent substance. With the 12 Pro’s silicon case I can do this without the glass I’m pressed against actually touching the lens because there’s a few millimetres between the case and the lens element. The same was also true of my 11 Pro and the Apple silicon case I had attached to it.

I like the screen of the 12 Pro, though I liked the screen in the 11 Pro as well. Is there a difference? Yeah, a bit, insofar as my blacks are more black on the 12 Pro but I wouldn’t notice the difference unless the 11 Pro and 12 Pro were right against one another. I can see both clearly enough to frame shots in sunny days while shooting which is what I really care about.

While the phone doesn’t have any ability to tilt the screen to frame shots, you can use a tripod to angle your phone and then frame and shoot using an Apple Watch if you have one. It’s a neat function and you can actually use an Apple Watch as a paired screen if you’re taking video using the main lenses. I tend to shoot handheld, however, and so only have used the Apple Watch trick when shooting a video using the main cameras on the back of the 12 Pro.

I don’t ever really use the flash so I can’t comment on it, though I do occasionally use the flash as a light to illuminate subjects I’m shooting with another camera. It’s not amazing but it works in a pinch.

The battery is so-so based on my experience. The 12 Pro’s battery is a tad smaller than the one in my 11 Pro, which means less capacity, though in the five months I’ve owned the 12 Pro the battery health hasn’t degraded at all which wasn’t the case with the 11 Pro. This said, if I’m out shooting exclusively with the 12 Pro I’m going to bring a battery pack with me just like when I went out for a day of shooting with the 11 Pro. If it’s not a heavy day of shooting, however, I reliably end the day with 20% or more battery after the 12 Pro has been off the charger for about 14-17 hours with middling usage.

Probably the coolest feature of the new 12 series iPhones is their ability to use magnetic attachments. I’ve been using a Luma Cube Telepod Tripod stand paired with a Moment Tripod Mount with MagSafe. It’s been pretty great for video conferences and is the coolest hardware feature that was added to the 12-line of phones in my opinion. It’s a shame that there isn’t a wider ecosystem supporting this hardware feature this many months after release.

Camera App

The default Apple camera app is fine, I guess. I like that you can now set the exposure and the app will remember it, which has helpfully meant that I can slightly under-expose my shots by default as is my preference. However, the default app still lacks a spirit guide which is really, really, really stupid, and especially so in a so-called “Pro” camera that costs around $2,000 (CAD) after Apple Care, a case, and taxes. It’s particularly maddening given that the phone includes a gyroscope that is used for so many other things in the default camera app like providing guidance when taking pano shots or top-down shots, and so forth.

It’s not coming back, but I’m still annoyed at how Apple changed burst mode in iOS. It used to be you could hold the shutter button in the native camera app or the volume rocker to active a burst but now you hold the shutter button and pull it to the left. It’s not a muscle memory I’ve developed and also risks screwing up my compositions when I’m shooting on the street so I don’t really use burst anymore which is a shame.

As a note, I edit almost all my photos in the Darkroom extension for Photos. It crashes all the damn time and it is maddening. I’d hoped these crashes would go away when I upgraded from the 11 Pro to the 12 Pro but they haven’t. It is very, very, very frustrating. And the crashes happen all the damn time.

Image Quality

In a theoretical world upgrading my camera would lead to huge differences in image quality, but in practice that’s rarely the case. It is especially not the case when shifting from the 11 Pro to the 12 Pro, save for in very particular situations. The biggest change and improvement that is noticeable in daily situations is when you’re shooting scenes where there is significant dynamism in the scene, such as when you’re outside on a bright day; the sky and the rest of the scene are kept remarkably intact without your highlights or shadows being blown out. Even when compared to a camera with an APS-C or Micro 4/3 sensor it’s impressive, and I can get certain bright day shots with the iPhone 12 Pro that wouldn’t be possible to easily capture with my Fujifilm X100F or Olympus EM10ii.

The other upgrade is definitely that, due to sensor and computational power, you can get amazing lowlight shots using the ultra-wide lens using Night Mode. Shots are sometimes a bit noisy or blotchy but still I can get photos that are impossible to otherwise get handheld with an APS-C sensor.

Relatedly, the ultra-wide’s correction for distortion is pretty great and it’s noticeably better than the ultra-wide lens correction on the 11 Pro. If you’re shooting wide angle a lot then this is likely one of the few software improvements you’ll actually benefit from with some regularity.

One of the most heralded features of the 12 Pros was the ability to shoot ProRaw. In bright conditions it’s not worth using; I rarely detect a noticeable improvement in quality nor does it significantly enhance how I can edit a photo in those cases. However, in darker situations or more challenging low-light indoor situations it can be pretty helpful in retaining details that can be later recovered. That said, it hasn’t transformed how I shoot per se; it’s a nice-to-have, but not something that you’re necessarily going to use all the time.

You might ask how well portrait mode works but, given that I don’t use it that often, I can’t comment much beyond that it’s a neat feature that is sufficiently inconsistent that I don’t use it for much of anything. There are some exceptions, such as when shooting portraits at family events, but on the whole I remain impressed with it from a technology vantage point while being disappointed in it from a photographer’s point of view. If I want a shallow depth of field and need to get a shot I’m going to get one of my bigger cameras and not risk the shot with the 12 Pro.

Video

I don’t really shoot video, per se, and so don’t have a lot of experience with the quality of video production on it. Others have, however, very positively discussed about the capabilities of the cameras and I trust what they’ve said.

That said, I did a short video for a piece I wrote and it turned out pretty well. We shot using the ‘normal’ lens at 4K and my employer’s video editor subsequently graded the video. This was taken in low-light conditions and I used my Apple Watch as a screen so I could track what I was doing while speaking to camera.

I’ve also used my iPhone 12 Pro for pretty well all the numerous video conferences, government presentations (starting at 19:45), classes I’ve taught, and media engagements I’ve had over the course of the pandemic. In those cases I’ve used the selfie camera and in almost all situations persons on the other side of the screen have commented on the high quality of my video. I take that as a recommendation of the quality of the selfie cameras for video-related purposes.

Frustrations

I’ll be honest: what I most hoped would be better with the iPhone 12 Pro was that the default Photos app would play better with extensions. I use Darkroom as my primary editing application and after editing 5-10 photos the extension reliably crashes and I need to totally close out Photos before I can edit using the extension again.1 It is frustrating and it sucks.

What else hasn’t improved? The 12 Pro still has green lens flares when I take photos at night. It is amazingly frustrating that, despite all the computing power in the 12 Pro, this is an issue that Apple’s software engineers can’t fix given the current inability of their hardware engineers to resolve the issue. Is this a problem? Yes, it is, especially if you ever shoot at night. None of my other-less expensive-cameras suffer from this, and it’s maddening the 12 Pro still does. It’s made worse by the fact that the Photos app doesn’t include a healing tool to remove these gross little flares and, thus, requires me to use another app (typically Snapseed) to get rid of them.

Finally, I find that the shots with the 12 Pro are often too sharpened to my preference, which means that I tend to turn down the clarity in Darkroom to soften a lot of the photos I take. It’s an easy fix, though (again) not one you can correct in the default Photos application.

Conclusion

So what do I think of the iPhone 12 Pro? It’s the best non-Fuji X100F that I typically have when I’m out and about, and the water resistance means I’m never worried to shoot with it in the elements.2

If I have a choice, do I shoot with the Fuji X100F or the iPhone 12 Pro? If a 35mm equivalent works, then I shoot with the Fuji. But if I want a wide angle shot it’s pretty common for me to pull the 12 Pro and use it, even while out with the Fuji. They’ve got very different colour profiles but I still like using them both. Sometimes I even go on photowalks with just the 12 Pro and come back with lots of keepers.

This is all to say that the X100F and 12 Pro are both pretty great tools. I’m a fan of them both.

So…is the 12 Pro a major upgrade from the 11 Pro? Not at all. A bigger upgrade from earlier iPhones? Yeah, probably more so. I like the 12 Pro and use it everyday as a smartphone, and I like it as a camera. I also liked the 11 Pro as a portable camera and phone as well.

Should you buy the 12 Pro? Only if you really want the telephoto and the ability to edit ProRaw files. If that’s not you, then you’re probably going to be well off saving a chunk of change and getting the regular 12, instead.

(Note: All photos taken with an iPhone 12 Pro and edited to taste in Apple Photos and Darkroom.)

  1. Yes, I can edit right in Darkroom, and I do, but it’s not as convenient. ↩︎

  2. I admit to not treating the X100F with a lot of respect but I don’t use it when it’s pouring rain. The same isn’t true of the iPhone 12 Pro. ↩︎

Categories
Reviews

Productivity and the iPad Pro: A Policy Wonk’s Review

(Tools by Christopher Parsons)

I don’t make videos for a living, nor do I engage in audio engineering. I’m a professional policy wonk and amateur photographer, which means that I do a lot of national video and audio interviews, a lot of writing and text-based communication, some image editing, and depressing amounts of media consumption. I also read a crazy numbers of PDFs and have to annotate them. And for the past two weeks I was consigned to work off my iPad Pro (2018) and iPhone Pro because my MacBook Air was getting its keyboard repaired.

So how successfully did I continue to work just from my non-laptop devices? Spoiler: it was pretty great and mostly convinced me I can lead a (mostly) iPad Pro work life.

The Tools

As mentioned, the hardware that I principally relied on included my iPad Pro 11” (2018) and iPhone Pro.

For the iPad I also had a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and a Magic Trackpad, as well as a cheap stand. For importing my photos, I have an old USB-C hub that has a SD card reader. For the iPhone, I routinely used a knock-off Gorilla Pod tripod, Manfroto head, and AirPods.

On the software side of things, I used Mail, Pages, Wire, GoodNotes, Mendeley, Reeder, Photos and Darkroom, Safari, Google Drive and Docs, Tweetbot, and Apple Notes to get my daily work done on the iPad Pro.

For interviews I was at the mercy of whatever the interviewers wanted me to use on my iPhone Pro, which was usually either FaceTime, Skype, Signal, WhatsApp, or Zoom, and I used Google Meet for non-broadcast communications.

Successes

The Setup by Christopher Parsons

On the whole I was able to do everything using my iPad Pro and iPhone Pro that I was doing when I was relying on my MacBook Air and iPhone Pro. My reading and writing were largely unimpaired, and my communications with colleagues were not noticeably affected.

Specifically, I was able to continue importing and editing photos, and worked in Google Docs and Drive to leave comments and contribute to documents that were in progress. Email continued to be dealt with using the native client, and I kept on working on Word documents using Pages. Apple’s cloud storage meant I had access to all my files on my iPad, just as on my MacBook Air.

Working with PDFs was simple and easy: I imported them to GoodNotes and shared them into Mendeley after I’d annotated them. I then deleted them from GoodNotes to avoid having multiple iterations of a document in different apps.

All of my communications were easy to maintain, though it was admittedly annoying to have to pick up my phone whenever I received or needed to send a message in WhatsApp. It’d be great if Facebook committed to the service, and made it available on all iOS devices like Signal has already done.

Minor Annoyances

There were one or two things that were annoying. I had to take a photo with government identification, and then strip away some of the more sensitive information. It took me a bit of time to figure out that I could move the photo into Notes, scratch out the offending information, and then output the edited photo to Files to then be uploaded. But it was annoying, not impossible.

I also continue to struggle with a good blogging process on iOS devices. I used Ulysses for years but the lack of new updates for non-subscription users was grating. Other non-subscription-based apps, however, don’t really support images as well nor upload as nicely to this blog. So I’ve actually started using the (mediocre) WordPress client. It’s not impressive, but neither are any of the other clients.

Major Pain Points

First, Google Docs is a terrible application that doesn’t work well. Period. In documents where there are a lot of tracked changes and comments it becomes basically non-functional. It got so bad that I’d write text in Apple Notes and then just copy it into Google Docs, or else I’d be stuck waiting for minutes for a sentence to finally be input. Google Docs is generally a dumpster fire, though, and it’s a shame that Google hasn’t properly developed their app or service in all the years that Google has operated it. (In my MacBook Air, editing in Safari is only a marginally better experience. Google really needs to get its act together.)

Second, Slide Over is incredibly confusing to get working. I’ve owned an iPad for years and it was only in the last two weeks that I finally figured out how to control it, and doing so required watching an instructional video. It is bonkers that this feature is so unintuitive to use and yet so easy to trigger. That said, once I figured it out, it was a very positive and transformative productivity enhancement.

Third, I absolutely needed my iPhone for actual video conferencing. The iPad can do conferencing, but it’s form factor sucks for this kind of activity. That’s fine, and I’d be doing the same if I was doing interviews or video chats with a working MacBook Air in my possession. Still, you’re going to want another camera (and a headset with microphones) if you need to so high(ish) quality calls when you’re working purely from an iPad Pro.

And that’s really it. Beyond the Google Docs app being a trash fire (and, I would point out, it is also just a less-bad trashfire when accessed using Safari on a MacBook Air), the inane complexity of Slideover, and need for a separate device for video calls, the iPad Pro pretty nicely replaced my workflow on the Air. I missed the slightly larger screen, but not so much that it was a real issue.

Concluding Thoughts

I really appreciated and liked using my iPad Pro and iPhone Pro full time. It was easy to set up and tear down. It let me get my work done with fewer distractions than on my MacBook Air. And the screen is noticeably higher quality than the Air.

So if you have a relatively writing- and speaking-focused job, and are doing neither a lot of video or audio editing (or, I suspect, spreadsheet work) then the iPad Pro could be a good fit for your workflow. Does that mean that it’s better than working off a laptop? Nope! But also that what a lot of reviewers consider to be ‘normal’ and what authors and policy folks think are ‘normal’ are very different, with the latter category being pretty well supported on iPad Pros.

Categories
Photography Reviews Writing

An Amateur Photographer’s Review of the iPhone 11 Pro Camera System

I bought my most expensive camera system last week: an iPhone 11 Pro. While the screen and battery life was something I was looking forward to, I was most looking forward to massively upgrading my smartphone camera. The potential to shoot portraits with a 52mm lens (as well as landscapes, street shots, and architecture…50mm is my preferred focal range), plus general shots with a 26mm and a 13mm equivalent was exciting. I’ve printed iPhone photos in the past and been happy with them, but would the new camera system live up to the marketing hype?

My Background

To be clear, I am by definition a very amateur photographer. Which, I think, actually makes this review a bit more useful than most. I’m not reviewing the iPhone 11 Pro as a phone or the entirety of the underlying operating system. I’m just focused on how well this device helps me make photos.

For the past few years I’ve shot with a bunch of cameras, including: an iPhone 6 and 7, Fuji x100,1 Sony rx100ii, and Olympus EM10ii. I’ve printed my work in a book, in photos of various sizes that are now hanging on my walls,2 and travelled all over the world with a camera in tow. I have historically tended towards street photography (broadly defined), some ‘travel’ photography (usually nature and landscape shots), abstracts, and admittedly relatively few portraits. If you want to get a rough assessment of the kinds, and quality, of photos that I take then I’d suggest you wander over to my Instagram profile.

I should be pretty clear, upfront: I make photos, not videos, and so have pretty well zero comments about the video camera functionalities on the iPhone 11 Pro. Also, if you’re looking for some raw technical stats on the iPhone cameras, I’d suggest you check out Halide’s assessment.

Body, Controls, and Handling

The iPhone 11 Pro is considerably larger in hand than the iPhone 7 that I came from. It’s also, with the Apple-branded clear case, quite slippery. This means that I’ve been super cautious in taking photos where dropping it might mean I’d lose it forever (e.g., shooting outstretched over rivers and major highways). The buttons are significantly more solid than my iPhone 7 and, as such, I’m disinclined to use them as a shutter button for fear of messing up my composition or introducing camera shake. Though if I’m being honest, it was pretty rare that I used anything other than the on-screen shutter button on my iPhone 7.

The screen of the iPhone 11 Pro, itself, is bright and beautiful. It’s night and day between it and the iPhone 7. To activate the camera from the lock screen you press and hold the camera icon; after a second or so, the camera app will open and you’re probably ready to shoot. Probably, you may ask? Yes: there’s a glitch in iOS 13 that means that sometimes the camera app launches but the image of what you’re trying to capture isn’t shown on the display. The solution it to take a shot and, afterwards, the display should display the image the camera is showing. Usually. But not always.

If you used burst mode a lot to get the right shot in a burst, get used to a lot of missed shots. In iOS 13, you press the shutter button in the camera app and slide to the left to initiate bursts; holding down on the shutter button start recording a short video (slide to the right if you want to record video and not hold down on the shutter button in the app). In actual use, I’ve ended up accidentally taking a bunch of short videos instead of a burst of shots, which meant I’ve missed capturing what I wanted to capture. A ‘Pro’ camera should let me set photo controls. The iPhone 11 Pro fails, seriously and significantly, in this regard.

When composing a shot, you’ll routinely see what is beyond the focal length you’re using. This means that, as an example, when you’re shooting with the 26mm lens, you’ll see what would be captured by the 13mm lens. On screen, the extended parts of the scene which would be captured by the wider camera is slightly desaturated and on the outskirts of the grid you can enable in the Camera app settings. Some reviewers have said that this looks like what you might see when looking through a rangerfinder-style camera, like a Fuji x100. I fundamentally disagree: those reviewers have not clearly used a rangefinder for extended periods of time, where you can see to the left and right of the frame when looking through the viewfinder. It’s helpful to have that in a camera you’ve raised to your eye, because the rest of your vision may be obscured and so you may not realize what’s about to step into your frame. This is less of an issue when shooting in a smartphone. Much less of an issue.

If you rely on a tilted screen in a mirrorless or DSLR to get the shots you like, while, you’re going to be out of luck. It’s a camera phone without an articulating screen. Maybe Samsung’s folding phones will integrate this kind of feature into their camera app…

I haven’t shot using the flash, so I can’t comment on what it’ll be like to use.

If you’ve used the iPhone Camera app, you’ll find that few things have meaningfully changed. The ‘big’ changes include a notification along the top left corner if night mode is activated (along with how many seconds it’ll take to use the feature) and an arrow along the top of the app that, if tapped, will let you switch some of the default features (e.g., flash on/off/auto, live images on/off, timer, or filter). Despite being a ‘professional’ device—which has a pile of internal gyroscopes!—the camera app doesn’t include a horizon level, though if you’re taking flat shots you’ll get an indicator to show if you’re perfectly level.

I tend to see the stock photos app as part of the control of an iPhone camera. Some of the additions are good—tilt shifts in particular!—but I loath losing how iOS 12 ‘grouped’ features into categories like light, colour, and black and white. And I really miss being able to adjust neutrals and tones in the black and white setting. Why’d you take those away, Apple? WHY!?

The battery life when I’ve taken the iPhone 11 Pro for a day of shooting has been great; I was out for about 7 hours one day to just shoot and took about 250 photos, while listening to podcasts and reading news and such. I had 17% after a full days normal use plus shooting, but I was shooting with a brand new battery in ideal temperatures for batteries (20-24 degrees). The real test will be when winter hits in countries like Canada or the northern USA and we see how well the batteries hold up in semi-hostile environmental conditions.

Image Quality

I’ve been super impressed with the camera system included in the iPhone 11 Pro. Despite being impressed there are definitely areas where computational photography is still very much a work in progress.

I’ve been taken aback by just how much dynamic range is captured by this camera when I’ve been making photos. This is especially the case when I’ve used the camera in low-light or sheer dark conditions. As is true of almost all cameras, it generally performs admirably in well lit situations. What follows are a selection of shots taken over a three day period; they are all edited to my taste, using just the stock photos app. What follows is a (broad) selection of those photos in indoor, high day, and sunset conditions.

I also did a late evening photowalk. It was pitch black (for a major urban city…) and so the following images are good representations of what urban photographers can probably pull off without a tripod.4 In many of the images I was resting the camera either tightly against my body or something in the natural environment (e.g., a tree trunk) to reduce camera shake.

I did run into some computational…weirdness…in some of the shots. When shooting the Cinesphere, I sometimes got this weird yellow arc that stretched along the top. Also when shooting scenes with the Cinesphere and the Japanese Temple Bell, there were times when it looked like the upper right of the frame (proximate to the Cinesphere in the shot) had extremely severe vignetting. Also, I noticed that I got lens flare when shooting at night; while this could be corrected in post using something like Snapseed I can’t ever recall dealing with flare on a regular basis on prior iPhones.

Also, don’t buy this camera and expect to get cool light trails using the default camera application. While night mode takes a lot of exposures to create the final shot, you’ll only get the slightest of blur from moving vehicles. Similarly, due to the fixed aperture of the cameras you’re not going to get any cool light flares or sun stars , nor can you seriously control the depth of field as you could in a camera with much more manual control.5

Conclusion

The iPhone 11 Pro is a marvel of a camera system. Seriously: it’s spectacular for the size of the sensor, though it damn well better be given its sheer cost!

I can see this camera fitting into the lives of a lot of creative amateurs. (Probably professionals, too, but with grumbles.) For me, and people with at my skill level with photography, this is a major equipment investment that I think will be pretty great: it’s a supplement to, not a replacement for, the aging Sony rx100ii I carry with me on a day to day basis, and it’s genuinely fun to shoot on. The Photos app, while annoying in some of its reconfiguration, is generally more powerful than in its last version. And the ability to easily and quickly shift between the 13-52mm focal ranges cannot be appreciated enough: it’s like having a permanent kit lens attached to your smartphone, and that’s just awesome.

Should you upgrade or buy this camera system? I dunno. I had an older phone and totally could have stuck with it for another year or so, and I’m happy with my upgrade. But for around $2,000(CAD) you could get some really nice new glass, which might be a better investment if you’re always carrying your mirrorless camera or DSLR with you, or if having better control of aperture, camera levels, or other ‘niceties’ are the core thing you’re looking for. But if you’ve increasingly been leaving your ‘big’ camera and glass at home, but still want a lot of functionality when making photos on your smartphone, and have the disposable income, then you’ll probably be pretty happy with the iPhone 11 Pro.

  1. In honesty, it was too much camera for me at the time, but it taught me to really love and want to work on my photography. ↩︎
  2. My largest prints are 24×36, from my Sony rx100ii and Olympus EM10ii (using an Olympus 17mm 1.8 lens). ↩︎
  3. Why won’t Apple bring the camera filters in Messages straight into their camera app? Oh hey! Did you even know Apple had a pile of filters for fun stuff in Messages? I bet not given how buried they they—open messages, tap the star button in the lower left side, then tap the three concentric rings, fight with the stupid UI a bit, and tada!↩︎
  4. If using a tripod, the internal gyroscopes will detect this and let you take up to a 10s ‘exposure’. ↩︎
  5. Some of this might change as Halide and other competing camera app manufactures update their applications. But the stock camera app is pretty limited in computation control of the aperture, especially for landscape or street photography. ↩︎
Categories
Writing

Feature Parity in Apple Notes

I have a love and occasional hate relationship with Apple Notes. And a mostly hate and kind fond memory relationship with my longstanding notes application, Evernote. So for the past few months I’ve slowly and tediously shifting a few thousand notes from one service to another.

This is the story of why, the joys and miseries of the decision, and what I hope Apple changes in future versions of its note taking application.

Evernote’s Trust and Pricing Deficit

Evernote has some serous problems to my eye. I like some of its features, such as the ability to search .PDFs and adding tags to different notes. But these features aren’t enough to overcome the baseline problem that I no longer trust Evernote with my content. There are two core reasons underscoring this lack of trust: the company’s questionable stance on users’ privacy and the company’s willingness to increase prices without providing a corresponding improvement in their services.

In case you missed it, Evernote announced a plan to have specific employees read the content their users added to their notes. The employee would be reading users’ notes to improve on the machine learning algorithms that Evernote was rolling out. Those algorithms, themselves, meant to improve the services provided to users.

So the company was only going to infringe on its users’ privacy for the best of reasons.

The company backed off from its decision pretty quickly in the wake of a media backlash. Nevertheless, the initial decision left a bad taste in my mouth. How could I trust a company that had so cavalierly indicated a willingness to intrude upon their users’ private content? Some people use Evernote for personal journaling, others to manage their businesses, some to store medical information, and yet others for their research and professional writing. On what possible grounds could anyone at a company based on storing people’s thoughts and dreams think it would be appropriate to have employees read potentially sensitive notes? I was already somewhat uneasy with the company but seriously started exploring ways out of their service following this particular privacy SANFU.

The second problem I had with the company was its decision to raise prices for professional users without providing a real benefit to end users. I get that companies sometimes have to adjust their pricing but as a long-standing user it seemed like I was being penalized after trusting the company in its infancy. It just seemed wrong to penalize very early adopters such as myself who’d championed the application from an early point in the company’s existence. There should have been a grace period, at the very least, if not an actual grandfathering of long term users’ prices.

So in the advent of these issues, combined with a decreasing enjoyment of the user interface and user experience more generally, I decided that I wanted out.

Enter Apple Notes

I’ve used Apple Notes off and on for a lot of years. And until the updates that came in iOS 9 I’ve generally stayed away. The service has just been deeply underwhelming in terms of its organization of different notes, to say nothing of the annoyances I had with sharing notes with other people.

The worst of those annoyances have been dealt with in a few ways:

  1. I can organize folders and use macOS to nest different folders in one another, which is essential for me to keep my notes in some semblance of order.
  2. I can search through notes with relative ease on all my Apple devices, though I admit this is an area where improvements would be delightful.
  3. I have more faith in Apple to push back against efforts to access my notes through a legal process, and to protect the privacy of my notes’ contents using best security practices.

Furthermore, I’m already paying for iCloud storage. As a result, shifting my Evernote documents to Apple Notes will likely leave me with a little more money in my bank account each year.

The actual writing experience in Apple Notes is a bit threadbare. That’s ok on the whole – the ability to add headings and titles, along with some baseline formatting is almost enough – and share sheets have made it a lot more pleasant to send a note to a colleague or collaborator.

Aside: The Miseries of Note Migration

There are some automated ways to pull data out of Evernote and into other note taking applications, including Apple Notes. But I’m not using them for two separate reasons.

First, I want to be able to re-curate all the stuff that’s collected in Evernote over then past years. So that means that I want to put my own eyes on old notes to determine what should and shouldn’t make the cut. I’ve shed about a thousand notes thus far and I’m pretty sure that even are going to vanish into the digital ether.

Second, the way I organized notes in Evernote changed over the years that I was using it. I did a lot of learning while using the application which mean that I changed my tagging and notebook structures a few times. That meant there was a pretty bad mess I’d built up and I wanted that cleaned up.

I should acknowledge that Evernote also put a lot of really badly formatted notes in my various notebooks and I’m spending more time than is really appropriate to fix up those notes. Specifically, I used the company’s web clipping tool on a regular basis and the way it clipped pages was often sub-par (to be generous). In some cases it meant that HTML was laced through notes. In others, the clipped pages were filled with ads and other badly formatted junk; this was the result of website publishers having to incorporate ads and ruin the user experience.

I should be blunt: I was working around the deficiencies of Evernote’s clipping service. Apple Notes has its own problems and deficiencies and, between the two, Evernote is actually better at clipping than Apple.

Limitations of Apple Notes

There’s still room for improvements with Apple Notes.

iOS is definitely an area that is still developing, and I periodically come across things that haven’t been implemented for some reason. One of the teething struggles associated with iOS’s Notes s linked with share sheets: why can I share a note with someone, but not a folder containing multiple notes? My use case is this: I often collect resources for ongoing projects in folders and it’d be great to be able to share all of those items, at once, as opposed to on an individual basis.

In a related vein, I’d be delightful to be able to:

  • Add hyperlinks to text in the Notes applications for iOS;
  • Create sub-folders in the iOS application (I can do it in macOS so why not in iOS?);
  • In macOS, automatically create a note when I drag a file — such as a .pdf, .doc, or other file — into the application.

I also really, really wish that Notes on iOS and macOS supported smart folders and tags. macOS already supports that kinds of functionality in Finder and (to an extent) iTunes and Photos! Adding these kinds of functions into the Notes application would mean I could more easily use the same note in multiple folders. The use case? I often keep reviews of articles and documents in Apple Notes and subsequently want to organize them into additional folders for specific papers that I’m writing or blog posts I’m drafting. As it stands now I need to make total copies of notes and re-create them in folders for the given paper or blog. That’s nuts: I shouldn’t be doubling or tripling notes.

But maybe it’s just too hard to do all that. So if I had to ask for a smaller thing it’d be this: please, please, please just let me pin important notes to the top of different folders in notes.

Finally, it’d be amazing if there was some integration of Markdown functionality. I don’t imagine that’s going to happen anytime soon, but it’d be nice.1 A better web clipping service would also be helpful: Evernote did a not good but generally serviceable if not good job of that and Notes just sucks in comparison.

NOTE: This was originally posted on Medium.

  1. 1: Yes, services like Bear might actually provide a better experience. And its support for Markdown makes it super tempting. But I’d rather pay for fewer services as part of some 2017 ‘financial cleaning’. ↩︎
Categories
Links

The Best Coffee Roasters in Toronto

Only helpful for those local to Toronto, but it’s great for those of us that are. I particularly enjoy Pilot and Propeller, though admit that my favorite place to get coffee these days is from Ideal Coffee (the Red Sea beans are absolutely terrific). Still, I look forward to trying the whole list and determining if there is a company that can unseat Ideal Coffee or Pilot and Propeller!

The Best Coffee Roasters in Toronto