- What's up everybody?
Peter McKinnon here, and today
we're talking mobile photography,
the hardware to use, the apps to use,
and is there even a point to the whole thing?
(cool relaxing music)
I didn't feel like making it this morning.
That'll change this afternoon (laughing).
What is up, guys?
Welcome back.
Today we're talking a highly requested topic,
which is taking photos with your phone.
Several months back I made a video on some of the apps
that I use and a few little techniques to get some
good studio shots out of your mobile devices.
But since then, I've been asked so many times,
what's the best phone to use as far as cameras go?
Is there any good third party peripherals
that I can attach to my phone?
What's the best app for editing?
And I'll tell you right now, it's all subjective.
It's really a personal preference.
There's some apps people love that I
just can't stand the icon on my phone.
The icon itself is just...
Snapchat's kinda like that for me.
I just can't deal with that yellow ghost on my phone.
Nope.
But recently a few companies have sent me a couple
accessories that I've been messing around with
when it comes to phone and phone photography or phonography.
I can't believe this is even a thing.
2017, phew, wow.
However, I wanted to make a little video going over
some of these new accessories, some of these techniques,
and the app that I have most recently been using
for all of the photography when it comes to my phone.
First up, I wanna talk about these crazy Moment lenses.
Now, I heard about these things months and months ago.
I actually heard about this company years ago.
I've never had a chance to use the products.
A full disclosure, I kinda thought when I first
heard about them and saw them, I was like, ah.
I mean how good could it really be?
I just kind of thought to myself,
well I mean like what's the point?
Like the camera on my phone is the quality
of the camera on my phone.
Like even if I attach a nice lens to it
the image sensor isn't changing.
I'm not gonna get more megapixels or anything.
The only thing I'm gonna do is maybe
get some different options as far as focal lengths go.
I was skeptical, to be honest.
So Moment reached out a couple months ago
and were like, hey do you want to try out our new lenses?
And I'm not being paid to say this.
They're not sponsoring this at all.
They did send me the lenses just to...
No obligations whatsoever, so thanks
for sending me those lenses guys.
And I gotta say I was pretty impressed.
Like these are beefy quality lenses.
Look at this.
Look at the element on that thing.
Like how tasty is that?
I just want to eat this lens.
That's what I want to do.
You can tell quality went into this product.
You throw a specific case on your phone
that has a little mount on it and
all you gotta do, line up the two lines, twist.
That lens is now on your phone.
You've got an 18 mil or you've got a
super fish, they make a telephoto and a macro lens.
I think for the individual that's like
not sure if they want to get into DSLRs
or mirrorless cameras or anything like that
but are like toying with the idea,
this is a great kind of stepping stone for that.
Now at the same time for the people
that do own DSLRs and those types of cameras,
I also think this is great.
There's something to be said about
just being able to leave the house like
a normal human without having to carry
your entire studio with you, 'cause let's be honest,
photographers, cinematographers, we love our gear
and sometimes when you leave the house with it
you bring this lens, you bring that lens,
you bring a backup body, you've got the drone,
you've got the NDs and the polarize.
It's just like some days I just want to leave the house
and if I see something I want to take a photo of
I bust out my phone, and if I happen to have
this tiny little fisheye lens with me,
yeah I'll toss it on 'cause I've got the
case on my phone already, boom, there you go.
Cool vantage, cool photo, see you later.
Now do I think phones will ever get to the point
where they replace DSLRs?
No, absolutely not.
I think there's a time and place for everything
when it comes to DSLRs, mirrorless cameras,
actual video cameras.
I don't think phones will ever really get there personally.
If they do, well I'll eat my own words,
but as far as it goes right now,
you spend so much money getting your phone
into like a cinema rig with a follow focus
and a microphone and by the time
you're done just buy a camera.
I mean you're almost at the same price point
you'd be with an entry level DSLR
or a mirrorless camera or something like that.
So my recommendation is if you are that passionate
that you're gonna outfit your phone
to be this like super expensive cinema rig,
just buy an actual camera and then invest into that.
It's gonna last you more long-term
and if you just want to go from hobby into
actually making money that's my recommendation.
Now that's just my thoughts on it.
You guys might feel differently and that's totally fine,
but as far as phone photography and like
professional photos and cinematography
and DPs and the business of that industry,
I think they're still very much separate.
So first thing's first.
Let's talk about these Moment lenses.
They sent me an 18 mil and a super fish.
It's not always about getting the best possible photo.
It's not always about like National Geographic.
Like sometimes we just want to take photos
because we want to have a memory
of whatever it is that's happening.
Like maybe I'm just on the plane with Dennis
on our way to Kenya and we throw on this
super fish because it allows us to get
photos in areas and confined areas
that we otherwise wouldn't be able to without it.
It's those kind of moments that these lenses come in handy.
Moment, it's kind of ironic that I said that.
Because the name of the company's...
Anyway.
A really great accessory that my friends
at Aperture sent me, and again they didn't
pay me to say this or anything.
They just sent me these because they're
a bunch of cool guys.
Look them up if you haven't, but this is called the M9.
It's this tiny little LED light.
Look at this.
Look how thin this is.
This is like a credit card sized thinness.
It charges via a USB cable.
It's LED powered.
It's super bright.
It has different brightness settings,
but if you just wanted to hold this
over someone if you're taking a portrait
and you get someone to hold this
if it's a little bit too dark or
you want to bounce it off something,
or a horror scene, light from above.
Maybe you get three of them and you
mount them in different spots of a car
and at night that car is just glowing
and you're like, how did you do that?
You just lit it with these little jobbies,
which is just incredible.
You've got different gels you can
throw over the front of these.
It's all modular.
This stuff comes off.
You can sandwich the gels in between.
They've got a little stand for them.
So investing in little things like this
that will not only help your mobile photography
get to the next level when you're shooting
in those low light conditions, but you can
use these with your actual cinematography
or your actual photography using
higher end cameras like DSLRs and stuff like that.
So super super cool accessory.
I'm only recommending it based off the fact
that it is this small.
This is, it's nothing.
It's nothing to just carry with you whenever you go out.
Stick it in your glovebox of your car
and you've got an extra super powerful LED light source.
So huge fan of those.
Links for everything is below if you guys
want to check out some of these
products that we're discussing today.
And lastly is the program, the software,
the apps that we're using to actually edit these photos.
Now in that last video I did I was a huge fan of Snapseed.
I haven't really been using it very much lately
because I have been hooked on the Lightroom app.
They also released an update for the
Lightroom app several days ago and
it is awesome now, so my personal
recommendation if I'm editing photos on my phone
I'm using the Lightroom app.
Not only that, I actually take the photos
with the Lightroom app as well
because they really enhanced the camera
that's in the app that you can use
to adjust all the settings of your phone
to shoot that photo right within the app itself.
So when you launch Lightroom and you get into
the camera that's built into the app
and you start shooting with that instead of
the actual camera from your phone,
they've got so many incredible features and it
basically unlocks all of the potential of your camera.
So they've got this new highlight clipping feature
where it shows you what's blown out right away
with a zebra pattern, which is super handy
because the high end video cameras
use the same style technique.
So if you've got an area that's blow out
in the photo you're gonna see that zebra pattern.
To fix it you're just gonna drag left or
you're gonna drag right and it's gonna
show you the increase in that pattern
because it's still blown out, or it's gonna
show you that there's no zebra pattern,
which means your photo's perfectly exposed.
So getting that shot right as best as you can
in the app in the camera before you start
applying edits is always the way to go.
It's also incredible that they actually
allow you to switch between jpeg and dng.
So dng files are gonna hold a little more information
and be a little better when it comes to editing.
So I always have it flipped over to dng
but just the fact that they make
that option possible is amazing,
because now you've got higher quality images
coming out of your camera, better for edits
straight off the bat without having
to do anything but flip a little switch.
On top of that I mean you've got all your typical,
you've got all your shutter speeds, your ISO.
They even let you control manual focus which is crazy.
You've got your grids, you've got your
clipping which we showed you before,
your aspect ratios, all of that stuff
is right at your fingertips within the camera itself.
That's before you even get into
their editing part of the software.
As you guys saw in that B roll, we just jumped
out of the car, saw this cool barn,
took a couple shots of it with the
Moment lens on to see what we could do with it.
It was a little underexposed so we can
change that exposure, we can bring up the shadows,
play with our temperature and our white balance,
all that basic stuff, but what I really love
is the spot selection tool.
So if you slide over to the very left here
and you click on that spot selection
then you can choose the brush.
Now very much like the Lightroom tutorial
that I did for you guys several weeks ago,
you can paint in a certain area,
you can paint in that mask, and then after
that mask is painted on with your finger,
you just go back into the edits
and choose what you want to manipulate
within that masked area.
So if we want to make this brighter
we just drag that up and now
the grass is brighter just in the foreground of the photo.
Same thing goes if maybe we want to add
a little more sharpness and clarity
just to the barn itself we can add
a new masking point, color that in with our finger,
come back down, boost the clarity on that.
Now that barn stands out a little bit more.
Same thing goes with the radial mask.
Just like we were faking having lights on
in different windows in that Lightroom tutorial,
you can do the same thing on your phone
or you can just have a little bit of that
radial bleed in from the right side,
add a little bit more brightness,
bring up those shadows, pump the greens,
just about everything you can do on your laptop
with Lightroom you can pretty much
do on your phone on the fly.
So we took that underexposed photo
like this and edited it within like
less than five minutes into something like this.
Now we also used the curves adjustment
so we could lift those blacks and
drop the highlights and really tweak this photo
to be exactly how we wanted it to look,
and Lightroom has also added that haptic feedback
so you can feel the different edits
that you're doing when you're applying them.
You can even use their pressure sensitivity
and if you press harder when you're painting
masks over it covers a larger area.
They've really thought the whole thing out.
The noise reduction is incredible.
So if you're editing a photo and you're adding
a little bit more green but it's becoming
a little bit noisy, now you can change
the color noise to bring that down
as well as the overall noise.
You don't want to go too heavy on it
because it can start to look, uh,
start to look weird, but all of that to say
this Lightroom app is amazing for not only
capturing the images, editing them fully,
and then saving them in a higher res capacity.
So when you add all these things together
and you've got that extra element
that gives you a new field of view,
you've got a little bit of lighting,
if you're outside of night, you're doing some portraits,
and then on top of that you've got
a super powerful editing software.
Now if you're already signed up for Creative Cloud
you'll have access to that Lightroom app
and I think you can even send those edits
back to your desktop afterwards from your phone.
So it's all linked and it's just a really really
cool way to get incredible results from your phone.
So that's it for today guys.
I hope you enjoyed it.
The links are below for any of those accessories
if you want to check out the lenses
or some of those lights.
The app is Lightroom.
You can download it in the app store.
Again, this isn't sponsored or anything like that.
This is just some of the stuff that I've
been playing with that I've really
been enjoying when it comes to
taking photos with just my phone.
Alright, so hit that Like button if you liked this video.
Subscribe if you aren't already, and,
and I'll see you guys in the next video.
I most definitely will.
Whoop!
(cool relaxing music)