I think that my camera can take better photos then most phones but some have gotten pretty good pictures (not any of my family’s) :smirk:

I’m very wary of phone makers’ claims about camera performance given how much they’ve been caught lying/presenting pro-grade camera pictures as their own, but it is absolutely impressive. I doubt you’d be able to get that result with a budget/entry-level telephoto lens.

I use the Joby GorillaPod (you can get one designed for a phone for pretty cheap) that’s great for macro with phones because it’s small enough for the distances required in phone macro and very versatile, being able to handle many different angles/situations. Also it’s not your hands, focus bracketi…

Define ‘good’ picture. Is it an exquisitely sharp, contrasted against a simple background, beautifully lit and composed shot of a common housefly? Or is it a blurry, poorly lit and noisy shot of a bee most suspected to be extinct, but a shot that still contains enough positive key clues to confirm…

My recent observation of the yellow v moth, I tried both ways. Hand lens over the camera viewfinder, and hand lens over the phone viewfinder. As usual, the camera’s “close up” mode isn’t; the phone was the one that actually took a non-blurry picture. Both pictures on that observation are from the ph…

But you can get better photos with say a DSLR, a camera that I would be happy to enter its pictures into a photography competition :thinking:

Yes, I was wrong about dragonflies. I also have a lot of quality photos of dragonflies, but I meant that they are difficult to take picture because a smartphone needs a close range, unlike a camera that has zoom.

In terms of success rate in photo’ing odonate, I’ll take my telephoto DSLR over my cellphone any day. It’s achievable with a phone but I’d rather shoot from a distance —with less disturbance of the subject —and not have to hang my phone over water.

The big prob with using zooms at a distance is stability and available light/shutter speed/aperture range combos. But the reach is a huge advantage for shooting all manner of flying creatures. I find I need to shut off autofocus to avoid FFF (fuzzy focus fits) in the AS system. That gives the advan…

that’s a fantastic foto considering the range, perfectly adequate for an ID.

After trying to get some pictures of a heron not all that far away from me and realizing what a blurry mess it still was with a phone I got a used Nikon D3400 and the detail really blows my semi recent oneplus phone out of the water, especially at not losing all details due to denoising it does. Bot…

Who thinks phones can take good pictures?

Nature Talk

Topic		Replies	Views
How do you photograph? General	40	3892	July 15, 2019
How to get great shots? Nature Talk	62	4186	June 14, 2021
What do y'all use to take pictures for observations? Nature Talk question , photography	64	3789	May 28, 2023
The "perfect" iNat phone Nature Talk	14	2971	August 5, 2021
Good cameras for nature shots Nature Talk photography	146	19735	November 14, 2025

Who thinks phones can take good pictures?

Related topics