My IWC Pilot on its new dress mesh.

 

Great shot.

It is quite amazing what you can do now with just a phone camera. I'm no photographer, but I can get lucky sometimes with my iPhone!

 

Excellent shot!! Any tips on what you did to reduce glare from lights and what not? For the newbie watch picture-takers out there... like me.....

 

Great pic! But I think mesh and dress dont go together! Again, that's Me thinks

 

This is window light. I have close to $30,000 worth of lighting equipment for my photo work but window light is still the greatest light you can get and it's free. I have a great window that faces away from the sun. I use a variety of black, white and grey reflector cards to help with reflections. I have a big black card facing the dial at the opposite angle to the iPhone to keep reflections off the crystal/dial and that's about it. The light coming in the window today was really soft/diffuse or I might have used a white card to reflect some window light back onto the non-window side of the watch. There is some levels/curves work and a little dust removal done in Adobe Photoshop...about 2 or 3 minutes worth at most.

My recommendation is to buy a couple of pieces of large black, white and grey matte board. Find a good big window with lots of light but no direct sun. Put a table in the window and put a watch on the table. Move the watch and your iPhone until you get a nice image on the screen then place cards to either make or take away reflections and open or close shadows. You may need to make some card holders with clips and stands. You can make a great little window studio in a few hours and your pictures will get better and better with practice.

I can probably ultimately do better with my studio lights but it wold take hours of setup and this shot took 1/2 hour from the time I decided to get out the old marine chronometer to posting it here.

JohnCote

 

Thanks.

 

Funny, i was struggling getting good pics with my Galaxy and she must be obeyed high end camera, could never get good pics, then got an iPhone 6 and it was on. Great pics i could confidently post here.

 

The iPhone 6 is a good camera but cameras are a minor part of a photography. Light makes pictures.

JohnCote

 

This! and this is why the iphone 6 can be such a capable camera! Editing is the next hurdle too. Couple some nice window light with the iphone 6, and you're golden!

 

I have a professional photographer buddy who has gone almost completely iPhone:

http://www.raddrewphotography.com/

He does a lot of editing right on his iPhone. When I want to edit I generally simply pop the iPhone pic into Dropbox and edit it in PhotoShop on my laptop. I went to Zurich a few weeks ago with my Nikon D810 but I only used it once for an actual product shot job. Everything else I shot was done on the iPhone. It is a lot easier to carry and it is constantly connected to the internet.

JohnCote

 

I have thousands in equipment and weirdly enough the picture that had brought me more awards and has sold the most in the last 6 months was made on an iPhone. A restaurant actually blew a print at 60x 45 which is crazy for a phone pic, but although pixel aged a little it works in context with an ultra non glare Plexi mount. Very artsy and effective and still clearly identifiable. Probably works because it's not a sharp picture to start with, but a mood pic.

 

Sergio,

What a fantastic image. Proof that a good photo is much more about how it makes the viewer feel than ultimate sharpness or any of the technical issues people fight about in online forums.

JohnCote

 

Thank you. I t certainly was a great moment. i love that the focus remains only under the umbrella while the world around them seems to be in chaos . everything stops under the canopy for that kiss. It sure is paying off.

 

Bingo! All you need is good light for the iphone 6 to shine. even editing on the iphone is pretty good now with some of the apps out there, if you know how to mix and match them for certain editing qualities- VSCO cam and afterlight is a pretty solid combo. If I could afford/justify having lightroom mobile, i'd probably have that with a bunch of VSCO presets and wouldn't need much else.

 

nice

 

I have certainly noticed on my travels over the past couple of years my trusty Canon EOS 10D is seeing a lot less action compared to the iPhone 5. Having compared my 5 with daughters 6 the camera is the one reason I may upgrade soon.
Old 5 -

 

Well, it has its limits though, specially for print media. I would not compare the natural DOF and optic quality of prime lenses with IPhone. Nor would I substitute the use of polarizing, grads and tint filters with pure post processing. It's a good camera for Street photography and for some screen shots and it certainly delivers but the control and quality you can get both in studio and off studio with pro equipment is still not matched, nor the control over speed, aperture, sensitivity and composition.

In short, can you make great shots with ANY camera? Yes, IPHONE? Yes can you match pro equipment at its best use with these phones? No.

In phone post production is good for tweeter and social media, but blow a print beyond 16x24 and you'll start to see the degradation in quality and sensor capacity as well as ISO speed sensitivities and avoiding noise and aberration under extreme circumstances.

Ironically the better the camera the easiest it is to make a bad shot, because the controllable variables increase over point and shoot. So iPhone and other cameras help non technical photographers take a quick usable shot, but it's not yhe same

 

Agree 100%

 

Couple of examples from my latest photo trip in Ireland. The cliffs is an IPhone test shot set on HDR and processed on the phone. It's impressive but on print it's flat and the sharpness is lost on large print pretty fast. Specially because the processing is destructive to the original shot. The street portrait is an example of a shot you cannot take with a phone. Look at the depth of field on his face alone, not only the background. Taken with a 50 L canon lens you can see the collar of the jacket and even his hair and sides slowly fading on an even and balanced way without affecting the luminosity. On the full resolution version his eyes and face are perfect sharp. You can blow that shot as large as you can without any fear. The last is a shot that can be made with or without photoshop, but it's actually only slightly worked on. The shot is taken with a combination of 3 filters. One to being the colour out, one grad ND filter to bring the sky clouds to the right exposure without loosing the foreground luninosity and a polarizer to control reflections throughout. Because so much of it is taken at trigger point with very little balancing you can get a clean realistic shot that again on full resolution can be printed to cover an entire wall. Again you can only transform an image from an iPhone to give you this wide circular effect. It's taken with a canon 16/35L lense. I can go on and on but if you go to my website you'll see plenty of examples that you'll have a hard time making on phones. But, the "right" shot can kill it with any camera if the photographer knows how to make the most of his or her equipment.

 

I certainly agree except I think you see the degradation at much less than a 16x24 print. I did not start this thread to say "better" or "as good" or to make any comparison. I just wanted to say that as a guy who has made a living with a camera, I love my iPhone 6...as a camera. By the time I go on vacation or anytime I want a picture just for me I am so sick of cameras that I used to just not take the pictures. Now I have a fun camera that works well enough and isn't a hassle.

Best,

JohnCote