The iPhone Camera

It’s sexy, it’s trendy. The creme of the cell phone crop. But does the iPhone camera hold up for well kids photography?

Yes, we all love our iPhones in a maniacal way. It’s hard to imagine being separated from this beloved device for a day, even a few hours. At least I am not alone in my addiction. I expect future history books to read something like:
 

Before the iPhone, man struggled, forced to endure the antiquated communications of morse code and the carrier pigeon. Banished to a livelihood of sedated, unhurried existence, like a group of turtles swimming in a jar of peanut butter.

Or something like that.Thankfully, we have our iPhone, and along with it a built-in camera.

The Specs

You can get your geek on and read all of the iPhone specs here, or I can summarize its paltry description of the camera - 2.0 Megapixels. While that number surpasses early digital cameras, the sensor inside the iPhone is very small. This means that while the resolution (i.e. the size of the image) may be higher than other camera phones, the small sensor will affect the overall quality of the images, especially in low light. Trying to take a picture in dim lighting with the iPhone is near impossible. However, the quality of pictures taken in daylight/well-lit environments is quite good.In the interest of full-disclosure, I did touch up these images slightly using Adobe Lightroom to make the colors pop a little more.Here’s a shot taken at an airport recently. While the iPhone wasn’t able to capture a lot of the shadow detail, it did a good job keeping the background exposure in check:

 

Low-light shooting is a different story. Don’t expect to get good shots in a dark room at night, as this shot at a recent Van Halen concert demonstrates:

 

Where the camera does excel, though is outdoor/well-lit shooting environments. I took this outdoors around 5pm, using a diffuser to soften the sun a little bit (I’ll explain this idea in an upcoming video):

Wrap-Up

Overall, the camera holds up reasonably well. I wouldn’t rely on it to get great shots at a sporting event because the shutter speed is too slow, but if your subject is still and the environment is well-lit, you should easily be able to get pictures that are keepers.

Tags: camera phones, iphone

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