Chicago. I went with a group of friends. We drove in there. No issue, a really
great time. Of course, I did do some photography, but in this case I used a
phone. So I was curious to see how decent of a job I could do with a phone. In my
case it's an LG Stylo 3. So it's older. It's not great with photography, but
there is the Open Camera application, which I did use with DNG RAW. So at least
with the RAW files I was able to eek out a little bit of extra detail and quality
with the photos. Gonna look at them throughout this video. But just generally
gonna talk about doing photography at a convention. In this case at c2e2. Let's
get started. A few years back I went to the same convention with the same group
actually. I was using the X100F from Fuji Film. That worked pretty well. With this
application it's open source. That's really nice. He's doing a great job on it.
Works pretty well on my phone. I'm sure... depending on the phone you will have
some features or other ones you won't have. I can do exposure compensation.
Either a half step or a third of a stop in that case. Just to not have the
highlights as strong and pronounced. Because this camera can easily blow those
out. Actually looking at the photos I think it could have dropped it down even
a little bit more on the exposure compensation. Because it just tends to
really have bright photos. The biggest challenge was autofocus. I could tell
that it was struggling. It's contrast based in this case, but still I was able
to get decent-ish photos. And then the shutter speeds were really low and that
was another challenge. Because if the person I was taking photo of was moving
too much that could cause an issue. Or if I was
moving too much... My general technique was holding the
camera out and double tapping on the face. I had the settings set up so that I
could be able to do that double-tap and it would take a photo automatically.
Instead of using the on-screen button or one of the side buttons. It does have a
face priority mode. I didn't try that out. It's just not worth the potential
hassles of it trying to select the different area. Or select a different person
that would focus where the camera decided instead of where I decided.
Gonna go over some of the settings I had in the Open Camera application that are important.
Face detection I did have off. Go into the more camera controls. Touch
to capture and then double tap to get that instant photo
taking. In the safe location I set it up to go to my SD card. It just has a lot
more storage. In this case this phone is pretty limited on internal storage.
In the camera preview area I disabled the zoom controls. I don't want to use any of that.
When I'm doing the raw files it doesn't make any sense to use the zoom controls.
because those relate to the JPEG files. I have it to show the battery,
show the free memory, and show the ISO on the screen that it's using. Those are all
optional, but just more information is nice sometimes. Have it set up to show
the histogram. I could adjust things. In this case things are happening fast so
in general I just take that photo. Try to get it as steady as possible. Like I said
I left it on a third of a stop or a half of stop. It was okay for the most part.
And then one of the settings it says show a border when it takes the
photos, so that I get some type of visual indication when it does finally take
that photo. This camera is pretty slow. The phone is
pretty slow to take the photos, but you see the results. It works out okay.
If you go into the on screen GUI settings. UI placement to portrait on the top...
I have it to show the RAW icon. You can tap that to switch between RAW, or RAW plus
JPEG, or just the JPEGs. Have it set to show the auto white balance lock also
the auto exposure lock button. In the photo settings, image quality for JPEGs
at 100 percent. In case I do use JPEGs I wanted it to be the highest
quality possible. And DNG RAW only is really what I use most of time. In the
camera API you can set it up to camera2 API, which is basically more advanced.
It gives you more features like the RAW modes. If your phone does support that
camera2 API that's good. You want to check that. Then he has a setting save
area they can save all of those changes to a custom file. I had set that up just in
case I changed things. I could reload that if I needed to. Now, I did see some
DSLRs. Saw some mirrorless cameras. Saw a few people with flash. Like more
serious setups. I think I saw Sony A7 camera at one
point. So there were dedicated cameras around, but still not as many as I would
have expected at a large convention like that. After this practice run with this
phone I would actually like to buy a more advanced phone. A phone with a
larger sensor. Better lens. Like a faster aperture lens. I think
this is 2.4 or so.. 2.2.. 2.4.. or something like that. I'm not sure on the sensor
size. I'll put it on the screen, but it's kind of just barely decent enough to get
okay photos with it a good amount of the time. Actually I think the biggest flaw
of this is the autofocus speed, which is not great.
There are definitely drawbacks to having that convenience, but I think in the
future I'll try to take the M5 with the 22mm, which I did have set up. I
just didn't decide to take it this time. I was curious to see how things would work...