Photographer’s Block and iPhone 15

[ImageArt]

It always surprises me these days that a new iPhone comes along and yet there isn’t even a ripple on Mobitog.

As you all know, I haven’t been around for a while. Been immersing myself in hiking and nature. A craving in my life for something more real and less plastic. I’ve somehow lost the mojo to take photographs or do photo manipulation. The world seems saturated with photographs and mobile photography competitions seem unreachable; the quality achieved just unobtainable. Gone are the days you took grainy, blurry photos and eagerly transformed them into something acceptable, arty, Hipsta. Every day photos that felt new are now old and boring.

Then came AI that has taken over from photo manipulation creating images the human mind can’t even conjure up. The old style of creating art from a photo feels pointless to me now.

I still have my old iPhone 11, not being impressed with the upgrades since. Now the iPhone 15 has arrived. Wow, 4 years since I had an upgrade. I’m wondering if this new version would breathe any life into my apathy. Not sure that it would. I really hate the bigger iphone max but x5 zoom would make a considerable difference. The quality would be a major upgrade but would it make me want to take more photos? I feel like the special mobile photography era is over. Photography is just photography now.

Is anybody else going to bother to upgrade? Has Mobitog just become a forum where being social is it’s chief benefit?

 

[terse]

It always surprises me these days that a new iPhone comes along and yet there isn’t even a ripple on Mobitog.

As you all know, I haven’t been around for a while. Been immersing myself in hiking and nature. A craving in my life for something more real and less plastic. I’ve somehow lost the mojo to take photographs or do photo manipulation. The world seems saturated with photographs and mobile photography competitions seem unreachable; the quality achieved just unobtainable. Gone are the days you took grainy, blurry photos and eagerly transformed them into something acceptable, arty, Hipsta. Every day photos that felt new are now old and boring.

Then came AI that has taken over from photo manipulation creating images the human mind can’t even conjure up. The old style of creating art from a photo feels pointless to me now.

I still have my old iPhone 11, not being impressed with the upgrades since. Now the iPhone 15 has arrived. Wow, 4 years since I had an upgrade. I’m wondering if this new version would breathe any life into my apathy. Not sure that it would. I really hate the bigger iphone max but x5 zoom would make a considerable difference. The quality would be a major upgrade but would it make me want to take more photos? I feel like the special mobile photography era is over. Photography is just photography now.

Is anybody else going to bother to upgrade? Has Mobitog just become a forum where being social is it’s chief benefit?

I've got a 14 Pro right now, and it was a good upgrade from my XS, especially for the 3x tele, although the ultrawide has turned out to be more interesting than I thought. Looking at the 15 Pro Max now, I'm not sure. The 5x tele would be nice, and I could trade in my 14 Pro to cut the price, but I'm going to wait until the 15 Pro Max gets out in the world to see what people find good about it after using it for a while. Right now, I think it'll take something more than the 5x to get me to upgrade this year.

I know what you mean about photographer's block -- I've been bashing my head against it for months now. Have I just shot up everything close by, so I need to get farther away to see something new? Do I need to start meditating to figure out what "see with fresh eyes" actually means? What inspiration I've had recently has mostly come in collages, which is still something fairly new to me, and working on learning to use Procreate finally. And I can still look at some people I follow on Instagram and be inspired by some of their work. (It seems like I should be able to look at the work that gives me a zing-y feeling and figure out from that what it is that I want to do, but so far, no luck.)

As far as mobile photography goes, I think it's lost its aura of outsider-ness that made it so interesting in the early years. Now it's pretty much just photography (never mind the cranks you can still find in photo forums who rant about "real" cameras), and I guess that was inevitable. I've always loved the feeling of being around at the beginning of things, when no one knows exactly what they're doing and nothing is well-defined, but mobile photography as a whole has aged past that now. And while "mobile only" made sense in the early years -- kind of like a motorcycle jacket and a skull tattoo -- it doesn't seem to carry much weight now. I've been thinking that the answer is in what I do with images rather than what I do it with.

One thing that has kept me going is spending time printing my images -- the ones I find most interesting -- and matting and hanging some of them around the house. Turning them into physical objects gives me a great deal of pleasure (from both the process and the result), and the prints often reveal something new to me.

 

[djingonthenet]

When it comes to choosing a new phone I'm not one that's wowed by a brands ability to bombard me with endless annoying adverts, here in the UK that is definitely a two horse race between Apple and Samsung. I'll always go for a phone/brand that looks to innovate push the hardware to the next level, create where others eventually follow. I know some people's hands are tied because of availability or the fact that they are consumed within the ecosystem of a particular brand or the fact that that's the brand they're going to buy no matter what and that's where I differ. I have no loyalties to any brand.

Since I've been buying phones (smartphones) I have never stood by a particular brand for more than 5 year max, HTC & Huawei were the main two by far but I wasn't ever compelled to buy their latest and greatest every year just because of the name, I've had Sonys, Xiaomis and Honors too and the deciding factor as stated above was innovation from the brand (which usually means cutting edge hardware) balanced with cost.

So when Apple, Samsung or even Google release a new flagship phone with "new" technology, especially when it comes to camera tech, I do tend to chuckle to myself. The 15 series is no exception, I'm hearing that they have the same sensors as last year, which possibly had the same as the previous year? The sensor sizes are way smaller than those leading the pack, true 1" sensors from Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo dwarf Apple and Samsungs sensors, why? They have the ability to make these changes (Samsung actually make larger sensor for their competitors!) but prefer not to, to keep profit margins high is the only conclusion that I can come up with. A new Periscope lens, the first on an iPhone, 4 years after Huawei released the P30 pro with a 5x periscope lens, 48mp ProRaw, again Huawei always had full sensor raw, the Mate 40 pro was 50mp raw, 100mb files compared to the iPhones 19mb. New cinematic mode 4k 60fps in log mode, again hardly new, my current phone does that and yet again before Apple. The P60 pro has 10 mechanical aperture stops negating the need for fake bokeh blur, I can't see the big two adding that to their camera setup any time soon, could be another 4 years to wait. My main gripe with the big names is that they don't push the boundaries, small incremental upgrades and larger price increases are the only constant from year to year, they rely heavily on brand name awareness and consumer apathy, which is great for business when people take the bait, but hardly fair on those that want the latest tech and value for money. And because of that I will never buy an Apple, Samsung or Google product because they don't do enough to win me over. The new Pixel 8 pro will be out soon, I'm sure the pricing will be it's main wow factor, you can't argue in that regard when comparing the big three, hardware wise it will lag behind several phones some of which were released last year.

My advice, when you can, look around and see what else is out there - the tech world is your oyster.

 

[ImageArt]

When it comes to choosing a new phone I'm not one that's wowed by a brands ability to bombard me with endless annoying adverts, here in the UK that is definitely a two horse race between Apple and Samsung. I'll always go for a phone/brand that looks to innovate push the hardware to the next level, create where others eventually follow. I know some people's hands are tied because of availability or the fact that they are consumed within the ecosystem of a particular brand or the fact that that's the brand they're going to buy no matter what and that's where I differ. I have no loyalties to any brand.

Since I've been buying phones (smartphones) I have never stood by a particular brand for more than 5 year max, HTC & Huawei were the main two by far but I wasn't ever compelled to buy their latest and greatest every year just because of the name, I've had Sonys, Xiaomis and Honors too and the deciding factor as stated above was innovation from the brand (which usually means cutting edge hardware) balanced with cost.

So when Apple, Samsung or even Google release a new flagship phone with "new" technology, especially when it comes to camera tech, I do tend to chuckle to myself. The 15 series is no exception, I'm hearing that they have the same sensors as last year, which possibly had the same as the previous year? The sensor sizes are way smaller than those leading the pack, true 1" sensors from Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo dwarf Apple and Samsungs sensors, why? They have the ability to make these changes (Samsung actually make larger sensor for their competitors!) but prefer not to, to keep profit margins high is the only conclusion that I can come up with. A new Periscope lens, the first on an iPhone, 4 years after Huawei released the P30 pro with a 5x periscope lens, 48mp ProRaw, again Huawei always had full sensor raw, the Mate 40 pro was 50mp raw, 100mb files compared to the iPhones 19mb. New cinematic mode 4k 60fps in log mode, again hardly new, my current phone does that and yet again before Apple. The P60 pro has 10 mechanical aperture stops negating the need for fake bokeh blur, I can't see the big two adding that to their camera setup any time soon, could be another 4 years to wait. My main gripe with the big names is that they don't push the boundaries, small incremental upgrades and larger price increases are the only constant from year to year, they rely heavily on brand name awareness and consumer apathy, which is great for business when people take the bait, but hardly fair on those that want the latest tech and value for money. And because of that I will never buy an Apple, Samsung or Google product because they don't do enough to win me over. The new Pixel 8 pro will be out soon, I'm sure the pricing will be it's main wow factor, you can't argue in that regard when comparing the big three, hardware wise it will lag behind several phones some of which were released last year.

My advice, when you can, look around and see what else is out there - the tech world is your oyster.

I bought the Huawei P30 Pro - my first deviation from Apple - and it was massively underwhelming. I thought it might just be me because if you follow a certain brand you do get used to a certain look - eg sharp, slightly oversaturated might be a typical look and when you deviate from this you miss the look you are used to. So I leant it to Rizole. He also thought it was average. There was so much hype about it and actually for me it didn’t deliver. Maybe I just got a dud. Anyhow, I stick to Apple now. I can’t afford to keep on trying different makes to discover they don’t live up to the hype. Now I’m just looking for improvement on what I have.

 

[ImageArt]

I've got a 14 Pro right now, and it was a good upgrade from my XS, especially for the 3x tele, although the ultrawide has turned out to be more interesting than I thought. Looking at the 15 Pro Max now, I'm not sure. The 5x tele would be nice, and I could trade in my 14 Pro to cut the price, but I'm going to wait until the 15 Pro Max gets out in the world to see what people find good about it after using it for a while. Right now, I think it'll take something more than the 5x to get me to upgrade this year.

I know what you mean about photographer's block -- I've been bashing my head against it for months now. Have I just shot up everything close by, so I need to get farther away to see something new? Do I need to start meditating to figure out what "see with fresh eyes" actually means? What inspiration I've had recently has mostly come in collages, which is still something fairly new to me, and working on learning to use Procreate finally. And I can still look at some people I follow on Instagram and be inspired by some of their work. (It seems like I should be able to look at the work that gives me a zing-y feeling and figure out from that what it is that I want to do, but so far, no luck.)

As far as mobile photography goes, I think it's lost its aura of outsider-ness that made it so interesting in the early years. Now it's pretty much just photography (never mind the cranks you can still find in photo forums who rant about "real" cameras), and I guess that was inevitable. I've always loved the feeling of being around at the beginning of things, when no one knows exactly what they're doing and nothing is well-defined, but mobile photography as a whole has aged past that now. And while "mobile only" made sense in the early years -- kind of like a motorcycle jacket and a skull tattoo -- it doesn't seem to carry much weight now. I've been thinking that the answer is in what I do with images rather than what I do it with.

One thing that has kept me going is spending time printing my images -- the ones I find most interesting -- and matting and hanging some of them around the house. Turning them into physical objects gives me a great deal of pleasure (from both the process and the result), and the prints often reveal something new to me.

That’s exactly how I feel. The problem I have with printing images, is that my DH wants his on the wall so I tend to avoid printing any!

Maybe I should concentrate more on animation. Procreate are bringing out Procreate Dream in November. $9.99. Worth getting that early I think.

 

[terse]

The problem I have with printing images, is that my DH wants his on the wall so I tend to avoid printing any!

Maybe you could mount yours and his back to back. Then as you walk by, you could each flip them over to your own side.

I suspect you're right about Procreate Dream -- the devs are likely to do a good job and the price is likely to go up. Motion defeats me, though. Still...

I'm going to try setting myself a project to work on, to see if that will wake me up a bit. I did do a series of six I titled "All cats are blue in the dark," and that was fun, but it wound down, so #7 never appeared.

 

[djingonthenet]

I bought the Huawei P30 Pro - my first deviation from Apple - and it was massively underwhelming. I thought it might just be me because if you follow a certain brand you do get used to a certain look - eg sharp, slightly oversaturated might be a typical look and when you deviate from this you miss the look you are used to. So I leant it to Rizole. He also thought it was average. There was so much hype about it and actually for me it didn’t deliver. Maybe I just got a dud. Anyhow, I stick to Apple now. I can’t afford to keep on trying different makes to discover they don’t live up to the hype. Now I’m just looking for improvement on what I have.

Interesting, I had the P30 pro too and had no issues with it, pro photographers that I talked to said it was off the scale when it came to IQ (for a mobile phone and compared to the competition) thanks to the partnership with Leica (lenses and image processing) and it is widely considered to be the straw that broke the camels back when enforcing the farcical sanctions as it was considered, in the tech world, to be 2 years ahead of it's closest rivals. But we all see things differently, when I made the switch from Huawei to Xiaomi the images looked completely different, not as detailed or sharp but again when showing shots I had taken with the Mi 11 ultra they were saying how DSLR like and organic they looked, which I completely understood. I'm now on to the Honor which, I feel, is a combination of Huawei and Xiaomi from an image processing point of view, which I like and the photos it can produce SOOC are second to none plus it was £550 less than the equivalent iPhone and S23 Ultra!

But then again, I'm just an amateur, see what I like, set up, shoot, move on kind of photo taker (won't say photographer as that's an insult to those that are)

 

[ImageArt]

But then again, I'm just an amateur, see what I like, set up, shoot, move on kind of photo taker (won't say photographer as that's an insult to those that are)

I’d put myself in that category as well. Not prepared to lie in the grass for 10 hours to get the perfect shot. Don’t often use a tripod etc, etc.

 

[Kevin Barrett]

I ordered an iPhone 15 ProMax with 512GB of memory today. Not because I needed it, but primarily due to the three year update cycle I am on and $830 trade-in through my phone carrier. The 12 Pro Max has served me well and it still serves me well to this day. Not expecting miracles from the 15, and anticipate the novelty will wear out after about a month. With that said, I am looking forward to the camera improvements and USB-C connector. It will not transform my work, but I do quite a bit of iPhone video and off-loading that video onto external drives through USB-C will be nice.

What has charged my photography up more than anything these days is shooting more, especially with older equipment. I bought a couple of old DSLRs and lenses from a thrift store. There is a certain charm about these old picture taking clunkers. Limited dynamic range, small mega-pixels and exaggerated colors that do not come close to reality. I love it! Even recently bought four rolls of film for my old Canon ELAN and picked up some old vintage lenses for my newish mirrorless camera for a non-clinical vibe.

Sometimes going backwards is all it takes to get you unstuck and start moving forwards.

 

[ImageArt]

Sometimes going backwards is all it takes to get you unstuck and start moving forwards.

That’s what I miss about today’s phones. The old impurities and unexpected imperfections had their own charm.

Maybe I should try some unusual ‘filters’ to create something different. I remember back in the day that a lady used interesting bits of cellophane to get unusual results.

I think I need a new phone anyway. My battery hardly gets me through the front door these days.

 

[Starzee]

I ordered an iPhone 15 ProMax with 512GB of memory today. Not because I needed it, but primarily due to the three year update cycle I am on and $830 trade-in through my phone carrier. The 12 Pro Max has served me well and it still serves me well to this day. Not expecting miracles from the 15, and anticipate the novelty will wear out after about a month. With that said, I am looking forward to the camera improvements and USB-C connector. It will not transform my work, but I do quite a bit of iPhone video and off-loading that video onto external drives through USB-C will be nice.

What has charged my photography up more than anything these days is shooting more, especially with older equipment. I bought a couple of old DSLRs and lenses from a thrift store. There is a certain charm about these old picture taking clunkers. Limited dynamic range, small mega-pixels and exaggerated colors that do not come close to reality. I love it! Even recently bought four rolls of film for my old Canon ELAN and picked up some old vintage lenses for my newish mirrorless camera for a non-clinical vibe.

Sometimes going backwards is all it takes to get you unstuck and start moving forwards.

I got $830 for my 13 pro max, too. Must be standard. I’m glad about USB-C connector as I have them for my iPads and they’re all over the house.

 

[terse]

That’s what I miss about today’s phones. The old impurities and unexpected imperfections had their own charm.

I've still got an iPhone 3GS I could send you

For myself, I'm not sure what the best thing to do is: Go retro and try to recreate conditions from the time when mobile photography was exciting and new? Or go look for something current that's exciting and new (which may not even be photography)? I spent all my working life working with words, so the visual arts -- all of them -- are unexplored territory that still ties my brain in knots. That makes them very interesting, and I find I have opinions about particular works with no idea where those opinions came from, but I also find that my visual imagination simply fails me frequently.

 

[ImageArt]

I got $830 for my 13 pro max, too. Must be standard. I’m glad about USB-C connector as I have them for my iPads and they’re all over the house.

Well, I’ve ordered an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Haven’t decided yet whether I will trade in my iPhone 11 Pro. I’ll only get £200 (about $250). I‘m finding it difficult to establish whether you can use it dual SIM in the UK, South Africa and the US. If so will trade in my 11. Have a trip to Arizona planned in November and then two months in SA next year. If I can’t have two SIMs will need an extra phone.

 

[terse]

Well, I’ve ordered an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Haven’t decided yet whether I will trade in my iPhone 11 Pro. I’ll only get £200 (about $250). I‘m finding it difficult to establish whether you can use it dual SIM in the UK, South Africa and the US. If so will trade in my 11. Have a trip to Arizona planned in November and then two months in SA next year. If I can’t have two SIMS will need an extra phone.

Well, I’ve ordered an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Haven’t decided yet whether I will trade in my iPhone 11 Pro. I’ll only get £200 (about $250). I‘m finding it difficult to establish whether you can use it dual SIM in the UK, South Africa and the US. If so will trade in my 11. Have a trip to Arizona planned in November and then two months in SA next year. If I can’t have two SIMS will need an extra phone.

My 14 Pro uses an eSIM only, but I've read that models purchased outside the US can use one eSIM and one physical SIM. I'd bet the 15 Pro Max is the same.

 

[ImageArt]

I've still got an iPhone 3GS I could send you

For myself, I'm not sure what the best thing to do is: Go retro and try to recreate conditions from the time when mobile photography was exciting and new? Or go look for something current that's exciting and new (which may not even be photography)? I spent all my working life working with words, so the visual arts -- all of them -- are unexplored territory that still ties my brain in knots. That makes them very interesting, and I find I have opinions about particular works with no idea where those opinion came from, but I also find that my visual imagination simply fails me frequently.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an VR Headset. Some of the three dimensional art you can make looks fun. However, I’m so anti Meta that I don’t want to get an Oculus headset which seems the best general headset at the moment.

Waiting to see Apple’s Vision Pro but it doesn’t appear to be the same. Just a way of navigating the OS through a mask. Looking at panoramas looks cool but not worth it for another $1000+!

 

[ImageArt]

My 14 Pro uses an eSIM only, but I've read that models purchased outside the US can use one eSIM and one physical SIM. I'd bet the 15 Pro Max is the same.

My existing phone provider only allows eSIM if it’s a ‘pay monthly’ plan and I’m a ‘pay as you go’ customer. It can’t be too long before that changes. I’d need a physical SIM for SA.

So if I need to get a SIM card in the US for my stay, would it have to be eSIM?

 

[ImageArt]

I presume with the quality of the cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the old Moment add-on lenses are superfluous?

 

[terse]

I presume with the quality of the cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the old Moment add-on lenses are superfluous?

They would be for me, given the 5x. And my experience trying to use their M-series tele on my 14 Pro was not good -- definitely unsharp, though not actually blurred. (I'm guessing the mount distance was a hair off.) They've released a new T-series of lenses, so I might be tempted if someone shows that the 2x tele works right on the 3x or 5x, but that'd definitely be wait-and-see. And the 5x/120mm equivalent is about the length I've wanted anyway -- I never used 200mm or longer lenses much in my rangefinder and DSLR days.

 

[terse]

My existing phone provider only allows eSIM if it’s a ‘pay monthly’ plan and I’m a ‘pay as you go’ customer. It can’t be too long before that changes. I’d need a physical SIM for SA.

So if I need to get a SIM card in the US for my stay, would it have to be eSIM?

I'm pretty sure you can still get physical SIMs for the US. For my 14 Pro, it was Apple that required the eSIM (no SIM slot at all), not the carrier. For what it's worth, Mint Mobile is the carrier I use here -- prices are good, and it runs on the T-Mobile network, so coverage is good also.

 

[ImageArt]

I'm pretty sure you can still get physical SIMs for the US. For my 14 Pro, it was Apple that required the eSIM (no SIM slot at all), not the carrier. For what it's worth, Mint Mobile is the carrier I use here -- prices are good, and it runs on the T-Mobile network, so coverage is good also.

Thanks for that! Had no clue.

 

[Starzee]

I'm pretty sure you can still get physical SIMs for the US. For my 14 Pro, it was Apple that required the eSIM (no SIM slot at all), not the carrier. For what it's worth, Mint Mobile is the carrier I use here -- prices are good, and it runs on the T-Mobile network, so coverage is good also.

Oddly, T Mobile coverage in my area is sketchy. I used them for about a day and had no service at my house.