Smartphone macrophotography

This is a follow-up to Photographing insects with your phone (2020), bringing it up to date by seeing what a current mid-range phone can do.

In Cameras for rambling greenies (2021) on my other blog I floated the idea that smartphones would soon become good backup cameras. The impending obsolescence of my phone made me look into that more seriously and put ‘good camera’ near the top of what I wanted in my new phone. Recommendations on tech sites and from friends led me to a Pixel 8.

Insects

I’ve been wandering round the garden with it, seeing how well it goes with insects and flowers. My conclusions in 2020 were that smartphone insect photography was worthwhile so long as you bear three rules in mind:

• Rule 1: Get as close as you can.
• Rule 2: Zooming in doesn’t help much because “digital zoom” makes your subject look bigger on screen but doesn’t capture any more detail.
• Rule 3: Be prepared to crop the image drastically if your subject is small.

First impressions of the Pixel 8 is that the camera is indeed better but its faults and limitations are similar. That is, I’m seeing an evolution, not a revolution. Here are a few of its best efforts with very small subjects, showing the camera hitting its limits.

At thumbnail size they all look acceptable but faults show up at full size, as you will see if you click on any of them to see it in the lightbox.

You may also notice that ‘full size’ is not very large. Each of these is only 600 – 800 pixels square. That’s a very small part of the original image, and it’s about half the size of most of the images here on Green Path.

But I can’t be too hard on the manufacturer: what I’m asking the phone to do is so far from what it was designed to do that I’m actually quite pleased with its performance. And it does do a good job with slightly larger subjects such as flowers and butterflies, if I can get close enough to them.

Landscapes

My excursion to Mt Stuart (previous post) was my first chance to see how well it handled landscapes. I made a point of pairing shots from the phone with shots from my mid-range DSLR with its general purpose zoom lens. Back home, I gave each a similar amount of editing (i.e., not much – usually minor adjustments to colour balance, sometimes cropping) and then chose the best shots for my post regardless of which camera they came from. Two of the seven came from the smartphone (I wonder if my readers can identify them?) and another was on the shortlist. That counts as an endorsement, I think, especially given that the device was so new to me.

Conclusions

The bottom line is that I now have a satisfactory second camera for my small adventures into the wild. The SLR is far better for tiny subjects with its macro lens, and far better for birds with its telephoto lens, but the smartphone can cover everything else. That means that I can put the macro or telephoto lens on the SLR and take occasional landscapes without having to swap lenses. I may eventually decide not to carry the wide-angle lens at all.

I also have a satisfactory pocket camera for everything from ladybirds to landscapes. It won’t do for skittish or distant small subjects (e.g. flies, butterflies, birds) unless I’m very lucky but it will still be very useful.

• A longer and more technical evaluation will appear on my other blog in due course.