Media and blog entirely from our iPhone 13 Max Pro

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The media and content of this blog were written and published from an iPhone, what can you do?

– THE PHOTOGRAPHY

So at first glance, I too thought “oh this looks like first gen iPhone all over again… until you take a look at some specs and actually turn over the phone to see these beautiful lenses!

Granted the first response I usually hear (from android users) is “it doesn’t truly have a macro lens”. Well that’s true, just google it and you’ll find “iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max have an upgraded ultra-wide lens with a larger f/1.8 aperture and 120-degree field of view that is capable of capturing Macro images at 2 centimeters distance” which about sums it up.

What it doesn’t tell you though is how much faster, easier and convenient it makes photography versus a digital SLR or any camera we’ve shot with in the past save maybe the abilities of the Sony DSLRs, but that’s a slightly different ballgame.

Like many, we had a DSLR (I’ve owned both canon and Nikon– quickly was converted to Nikon lover for the speed and lightweight design) but none of the camera or lens were easy enough to throw in my pocket and have at a moments notice to not “miss that Kodak moment”.

Ok so enough speal, let’s get to the media! These were off the cuff couple second photos in our backyard, edited only with the PicCollage app but no filters or zoom applied even when taking the shots:

iPhone macro 1 hibiscus flower

Never have I seen the detail of the buds on these flowers so clearly before! This literally was a wall up and shoot, stand closer and retake, move in to the 2cm depth as promised to see the lens auto swap and expose a beautiful up close view of the amazing beauty you can see in such great detail here.

So I thought I’d try it again and see how fast this can be in brighter daylight mid day of October here in Arizona, and it was…. amazing again! Granted if wind is blowing it becomes a bit more difficult to capture that macro shot because the software is doing the work, but it still did a pretty good job:

Backyard tree flowers

Lastly I saw a lizard running across our garden and I thought I’d see how well it might capture a moveable target… the results were pretty nothing to be disappointed about if you love nature up close:

Nature macro photography

– VIDEOgraphy

Ok so the photography right off the bat was pretty bomb… so what’s the big deal about this cinematic video?

After taking this first video I thought, why even offer a standard video format with this option to post edit and have real time focus!?

I suppose not everyone wants to capture high quality video that is easy to post edit and refocus especially on kids that move like squirrels in case you want to make sure you don’t miss that video moment memory… and they’re probably android users. Hey, no offense, but we’ve all seen android pictures & videos- most of them slightly blurry and out of focus where it counts.

Ok, so below you’ll see two formats of the same video. One was captured as my very first initial video and the second is a post edit of the video allowing me to refocus points simply by clicking my focus area.

Video 1: you find the auto focus on our son was well maintained no matter moving other items into view where normally iPhone would try to focus and even when adding another face into the frame for iPhone 13 to attempt to software process some focus:

Same Video post edited: you’ll see most of the video is blurred because we refocused the couch or on our daughter instead of where the video wanted to “look” to focus:

You’ll notice when you edit on iPhone in the basic video editor that it drops a key frame so you can easily see where you’ve modified focal points and it also shows overlaid in video where it is currently focused (in yellow) with where it can also try to focus or where it would like to try focusing with outlined white:

In the next photo I’ve held down with long press as I scrolled over and the video software zooms in on the area showing the last focus point, it also maintains the current and optional focus areas even after telling the software my focus preference:

This is nice because sometimes long videos may need more drop points or refocus depending on what you’re shouting. However I think for most of our editing we won’t need to hold down and refocus smaller areas… but this is a really nice editing feature if you are shooting some pro photo or have multiple focal points in a small amount of time you’d like to switch between.

Overall, I was incredibly happy with this already, being both an Apple Final Cut Pro as well as a Davinci Resolve fan (let’s just not mention the adobe product that crashes every 10 minutes). This is going to save us loads of time in editing right away from our phone and if we feel like adding things, we can drop into our post edit tools.

So what does regular video look like? Ok I’ll bite, here’s some standard video for you to see some basics of the 4k standard option.

Here’s the same lizard from earlier in a first attempt without any attempt at focusing and allowing iPhone to do all the work:

Here’s a day light indoor shot of our daughter being super cute singing “where are you Christmas” capturing audio from another iPhone and no mic:

And the infamous low light conditions of video, granted it was pretty dark so it still doesn’t win in low light video conditions, but the photos in low light are actually pretty impressive!!