September 17th Monthly Meeting

Next George introduced the main focus of this month's meeting, how to use advanced features of smartphones. to supplement our use of traditional cameras  A show of hands indicated that most of our members used Apply iPhones; a few are Samsung users.

But few were even aware of, much less using, "Pro" features available in today's smartphones.

And in this session of the September meeting, we barely scratched the surface of all the features and tips and tricks that need to be covered, in this area of photography.

Both Apple and Samsung phones come with built-in “Pro’ or "Manual" shooting options, pre-installed.

Apple iPhones support Apple ProRAW, giving you control over image data and formats, built straight into iOS rather. You turn on the feature by going to Settings > Camera > Formats and enabling Apple ProRAW or ProRes.

Samsung Android Phones come with a fully featured Pro Mode (for both photos and video) built directly into the camera.  You just open the Camera app, tap More at the bottom of the screen, and select Pro or Pro Video.

Pro Mode lets you manually adjust ISO, shutter speed, manual focus, white balance, and exposure values.

(For more advanced uncompressed editing, Samsung also offers an optional app called Expert RAW)

Since most of of those attending used Apple, Frank demonstrated and explained "Pro" features of the iPhone

He recommended that we utilize Mobile Lightroom to maximize the use of pro features, beginning with actually taking the photo via Lightroom.

Frank said that If you have Lightroom already on your phone, it’s very useful. There was a time when he wouldn’t entertain editing a photo on his phone or even my iPad, but when Apple came out with the iPad Pros and the Surface Pros, Adobe upped their Mobile effort and made it possible for us to really do effective editing on our smartphones.

• In the lower right corner of Lightroom on your iPhone there’s an icon for the camera.  Tap on the camera. You can frame your subject, tap the shutter button & take your picture.

• You have exposure compensation, ISO, and shutter speed controls right there.

•  You can dial your light balance by cloudy, shade, whatever you want or even by Kelvin. (Kelvin is of course a scale of measurement of temperature.  We measure light in a Kelvin scale.  We measure wind air in Celsius or Fahrenheit, but Kelvin at noon on a sunny day when you have the most natural type of light gives you whites that are the purest.  That’s why museums, libraries, art galleries and photographers use daylight white balance.)

Frank answered questions such as

Shoot Manual or Auto? If you’re outdoors, auto will work fine. My recommendation is if you’re looking at your phone and it does not match your scene, you should creatively change it to warmer or cooler.

How do you Pan on iPhones? Normally you would pan from the right from the left to the right but if you want to pan in the other direction just tap the screen in the middle and the arrow flips and now you can pan from that to this side. If it’s a building you’re shooting you can flip it, hold the phone from the landscape and go up and down

After you take a shot via Mobile Lightroom, where does the picture appear? You can have it go to your camera roll, or it’ll be in Lightroom.

How do you change between lenses? If you have a iPhone 16 or newer they have a camera control button where you can just tap it and then change your lens choices.  Or you can pinch to zoom and widen.

Crop Factors were discussed, comparing smartphones with traditional cameras.

• A “full frame” sensor measures 35mm, (matchings the exact dimensions of a single frame of 35mm still photography film) Assume that a full frame sensor has a "crop factor" equal to 1.


• But smaller sensors, like those in cellphones, “crop in” on images & make them appear closer.


• Smartphones typically have crop factors between 6X and 10X, because their sensors are tiny. A smartphone using a tiny physical lens, say, 5mm in size, but frames a scene to look like like a 35mm lens on a real camera because of a ~7x crop factor.


• Crop factors impact image quality, low light performance & focal length.

Frank and Alan discussed specific compariosons between camera and iPhone in this area.

• Alfredo started out in a call center in the Dominican Republic, but his talents & hard work brough him to the attention of Nikon, who hired him.


• He provided Technical Support for a time, then moved into marketing, and became up a National Product Manager.


• He took Nikon productss, - cameras, camera lenses, software products- from beginning to deployment, bringing them to market.


• He had the "fun job" of playing with products before they were released.


• According to Alfredo, "Playing with the toys before anybody else is fun, but it comes with a lot of responsibility. Coming from a technical background, I would love to make the product fail because if I make it fail I don’t have to fix it later. I worked all the way from the pointy cameras to DSLR’s to now mirrorless models. I could use products in the price range of anywhere from $100 to $20,000. It’s a  huge benefit, but if something happens to that 20 grand lens I’m responsible for it!"



• Alfredo came into Nikon during DSLR era, but he started his photography with film.

where
the Smithtown Library - Kings Park Building

when
We meet on the third Thursday of the month beginning at 7:00pm, in the downstairs meeting room.  

PLEASE NOTE
If the Smithtown Library - Kings Park Building isn't available,
meetings may occasionally be held at the Commack Branch
of the Smithtown library-
Commack Building

Content
The meeting begins with a montage of members' photos with comments from each photographer, then short “business” items, such as group photo shoots or special projects. 

Presentations are the focus, usually made by club members.  For example, George and Michael recently did a presentation on chiaroscope photography.

Guests are always welcome.