As I wrote two posts ago, I think the iPhone 7 plus has a brilliant camera for a cell phone. I have taken many very good still and videos with it. But even though you can capture very good shots and video it is a general pain in the ass to put them in an organized file system. When you turn on the Apple auto upload (which you really have to do to get the camera to work well) it sends photos to your other IOS devices and your iCloud photos automatically if you are connected to wifi. If you are traveling and only have access to mobile data, too bad. Apple waits till you connect to wifi.
But lets say you do connect your phone to wifi and the pictures auto go to the Apple pictures app in iCloud. If you only want to use the Apple photo app to adjust pictures than you are set. That is unless you want to have a regular file system like almost every good photographer does. Then you have to export from the Apple app to your file system. Or you can use the hard to find “Apple image capture app” and download by wire to your computer. Apple’s photo app stores copies of your photos in places it is almost impossible to find. And all of this works best if you have a Mac. If you have a Windows computer, well then you have to wait for your photos to go to iCloud and then you can download them to your computer. If you are not on wifi then you won’t be doing this until you are. Supposedly there is a way to download photos from your iPhone to a Windows computer. There used to be as I did it. But sometime in the recent past that ability was deleted.
Or lets say you want to take a raw photo. Well you have to use Lightroom or some other app that has raw ability. To do this though you need Lightroom mobile. And to get the Lightroom mobile camera pictures to your computer or say an iPad you have to use a wireless connection. I have found no way to take Lightroom photos off an iPhone with a wire. It is true you can move the Lightroom photo to the camera roll and then use Apple image capture to remove photos by wire. But your raw pictures are converted to jpeg when you do that. And lets say you want to move your camera roll photos to Lightroom mobile on your phone to edit or download pictures wirelessly when you don’t have wifi, well then you will end up with a giant Lightroom mobile file on your computer. Mine got to 16 gigs before I shut it down.
Confused yet? So while the iPhone 7 plus has a brilliant camera it is hard to live with in practice if you want to carefully file your pictures and videos, or edit them with Lightroom. This problem could easily be solved by Apple if they made their phones like most Android phones where you just plugged them into your computer and moved the pictures off. Easy peasy. But I think Apple is too busy designing the next iPhone to make these kinds of changes that people like me want. So once more, I do love the Apple iPhone 7 plus camera, but do not like (hate) the complex “Kafka-like” crap you have to go through to get the files off.
A few days ago I bought a Sony compact camera DSC-HX80, for the sole purpose of not having to putz with this issue. So far my $400 Sony takes pictures that are a bit better than what you can get from the iPhone. It has a zoom lens that goes from 24mm – 720mm. It is astonishing how good the pictures come out using 720mm. It has a lot of the same adjustments my Nikon DSLR has, meaning, it is much more adjustable than the standard Apple camera app. And it even has a viewfinder. Taking photos off the Sony is exactly like what you do on my Nikon DSLR, meaning very easy, and it fits with my file system. I do not intend to not use the camera in the iPhone, but I do intend to use it a lot less.
Below are a few test shots from the Sony. BTW the Sony has really good color rendition.
The shot below is my first telephoto test shot. This is amazingly good for how far away these kids were. It froze the action and this was hand held! You could never ever get a shot this good out of the iPhone 7 plus.
Bob Nuttmann 