If you look at plant observations in iNat, almost all closeups include someone’s hand. That’s to tell the phone where to focus–everyone does it. When you see a really good closeup picture of a plant, it’s almost been taken with a conventional camera. The hold and lock focus for iPhone has never been dependable for me and I’m always trying to get the picture done quickly. I get the feeling with the iPhone that it defaults to faraway if there is something faraway. It would be nice to have a mode that said–focus on the thing in the middle.
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I tried Halide but didn’t do great with it. I think it’s partly because I had gotten addicted to the image-processing things the iPhone camera does without even realizing it. But, I also think trying to approximate what you get with a single-lens-reflex 35 mm camera without having all of the easy-to-manipulate knobs and dials is very tough. Maybe I’ll try Halide again.
Yes. This is with the iPhone RAWs.
Interesting.
I admittedly didn’t realise this existed… but still, the biggest issue for me is…as others are mentioning… if shooting an insect on a blade of grass, most of the time the focus just won’t lock at all on to the element in the foreground. Locking focus on my finger beforehand or something might be a good workaround, but better would be yes…some sort of manual focus / lock / a way to prevent the lenses switching.
It was actually easier and roughly equivalent in quality to use an iphone 7 with a Revolvr lens as it is to use the built in macro with iPhone 13 pro… due to the way it will flick between lenses and not hold focus where you want. Hope this gets fixed soon!
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sometimes you’re limited by the minimum focus distance of the camera. it looks like iPhone 13’s MFD is 15cm. so if your subject is closer than that, you won’t be able to focus on it at all.
sometimes its hard to judge whether you’re beyond the MFD. so if you can lock on something at 15cm first, then point your phone at the insect, and move it back and forth until you achieve focus, then that might allow you to get shots more consistently. the only problem is that sometimes it’s hard to tell if you are actually in perfect focus because sometimes it can be hard to judge on a phone screen. that’s why i think having focus peaking could be helpful in this sort of workflow.
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I have the 13 pro… it´s possible to focus just 1-2 centimetres away… but that´s not what´s in play here - as others are saying - it simply isn´t possible to choose focus on foreground elements sometimes as needed
focus lock is a neat workaround though, and does help
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The minimum focus distance for the iPhone 13 Pro is supposedly 2 centimeters, not 15. Regardless, I can rarely get it to focus on anything closer than a foot away unless it is my hand.
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it looks like the camera on the 13 pro that is able to focus that closely is the ultrawide camera. i wonder if you can get any better luck focusing on close objects if you force the use of ultrawide camera by selecting 0.5x as your zoom when taking photos?
i think under normal circumstances, as you get closer to the subject the phone will automatically switch over to macro mode, which i assume is just the ultrawide camera, with a digital zoom applied. but if you force it to use the ultrawide camera to begin with, then you don’t need to wait for the phone to decide to switch over, and you don’t get the weird camera shift, although maybe you might need to manually crop in after you take the photo to get the same framing. or maybe instead of manually cropping after, you can increase the zoom after you’ve acquired focus, and then take the photo?
Yeah as others have said, it flips between lenses and focus points… so, whilst I might want background it will choose foreground, or vice versa… there is no way to force it exactly - but if you mean the focus lock you pointed out - yes, that may solve this largely.
The option to lock focus should be more clearly shown in UI.
I had no idea this existed.
choosing 0.5x zoom should force the phone to use the ultrawide camera, since that’s the only camera on the phone capable of that zoom. my hypothesis is that when you start on the ultrawide camera to begin with, that should increase your chances of being able to focus on something closer than 15cm even when there are background elements that are further away. my hypothesis is that when you start with the main camera at 1x zoom, as long as you have background elements 15cm or further away in the focus box, the switch to the ultrawide camera for macro will never occur because the main camera physically can’t resolve the thing in the foreground and so assumes the thing it can focus on (in the background) is the intended subject. i can’t test the hypothesis though because i don’t have a 13 pro nearby to test the hypothesis.
I never tried this and will. I have never been able to get the lock thing to work.