navelgazing.omphaloskeptic.net Journal

Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

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Photos Austin, TX, Sunday, 20 July 2014 10:54am

I've posted pictures on Flickr. And some panoramas on Photosynth

This trip was an experiment for me, the first major trip in a long time where I didn't take a DSLR with a large lens. My DSLR's lens broke in the middle of the Nicaragua & Costa Rica trip, so I finished out that one with just the iPhone's camera, but for this trip, I set out with just the iPhone from the beginning.

There were definitely positive things:

  • it's liberating to not have to carry a camera bag and to not have something bulky strapped to me
  • it's easy to share images quickly with the iPhone
  • the Panorama modes are quite useful for landscapes and vertical shots
  • image quality is quite good for shots that don't need zooming/cropping
  • images are geotagged and have correct timestamps
But there were some big negatives:
  • lack of optical zoom means that zooming on the phone is just throwing away pixels. The resulting images generally look bad
  • it discourages me from framing the photo properly, since I know I'm going to have to crop in post
  • I found I couldn't isolate things like architectural details that I would normally photograph
  • the phone was in use enough that I had to use a battery pack for it
I think that for my next trip, I'll get a pocketable camera with a zoom lens.