Good cameras for nature shots

I played around with my A53 and Pixel 7 in order to make bursts (formerly known as “sports mode”, that name now seems to describe adding creative motion blur).

  • Pixel 7/Android 14: Google worked hard to take burst mode away (they changed the function of holding the shot button from burst to video, and “top shot” doesn’t create bursts either anymore). I downloaded GCam first, but that was useless (time step between shots was random and about 1 second on average despite having set the delay to none). OpenCamera v1.52 seems to work, one has to go thru the settings first. It feels a bit slow, not yet tested on real animals.
    • Images go to /storage/emulated/0/DCIM/OpenCamera/
    • Filenames are IMG_yyyymmdd_HHMMSS-x.webp (I switched to webp format)
      • the time in the filename varies instead of being constant over the burst.
    • I don’t have an SD card in that phone so I don’t know if it would be possible to send bursts there.
  • Samsung A53/Android 13: drag the shot button down and hold it, it fires as long as you hold it.
    • Images go to /storage/emulated/0/DCIM/Camera/
    • if you have an SD card, the camera app warns you that burst photos can only be sent to the internal memory (the path to the normal photo directory is /storage/xxxx-yyyy/DCIM/Camera where xxxx-yyyy are numbers the meaning of which I don’t know)
    • filenames are yyyymmdd_HHMMSS_xxx.jpg where xxx is the serial number of the image and the time is constant along the burst.