You don’t realize how GOOD the iPhone camera actually is, until you try to point and shoot with a “real” camera. In this post, I’m going to document my story of slowly improving in low-light interior shots using my Nikon Z5, and why my pictures sucked (and probably still do) compared to just clicking with my iPhone.
Day 1 – Fully Automatic
I unbox my camera and run over to Mochi to inaugurate my first shots – and they look as soft and doughy as Luka Dončić. All the settings are on full Auto, so I’m sure it’s an autofocus problem with the camera. I spend hours reading through the autofocus modes and even manually focusing the subject; but they all come out smeared like above.
If I knew anything about the exposure triangle at this point, I might have noticed the extremely high ISO which is the root of the issue. ISO typically adds light to the image at the expense of adding more noise – Nikon’s JPEG processing hates noise and tries to smooth it out, resulting in soft photos. Since I’m not shooting RAW, this softened overprocessing is permanent and irrecoverable.
At this point I still think the camera is just bad in low light.
Day 2 – Raw Power
In the course of experimentation, I changed my camera to shoot in RAW and immediately was flabbergasted at the improvement in quality. With the exact ISO as before, my pictures were coming out tact sharp. Sure, there was a lot of noise and grain, but it felt monstrously better to be able to pick out individual whiskers and strands of fur in my shots. I wasn’t even concerned about the grain at this point, but at the back of my mind I still had a nagging question: how is my phone able to capture grainless shots with complete sharpness in the same lighting conditions?
Day 3 – Taking Things Slow
The final ingredient missing that allowed me to take shots that I feel at least rival my phone’s quality was the shutter speed. After a few weeks of owning the camera and feeling comfortable on manual exposure settings, I realized the onboard image stabilization in the Nikon Z5 and kit lens is quite good! I can take shots as slow as 1/10 of a second in shutter speed and still maintain sharp photos. This revelation would never have presented itself as an Automatic Andy – the “Auto” setting of the Z5 is very reluctant to take you below 1/50 of a second or so.
By taking photos with slower shutter speed, I can reduce the ISO from its embarrassingly high default (by the way, I just changed the setting to put an upper limit of 8000 on the auto ISO). Sure, this comes at the tradeoff of not being able to capture movement as well, but I realized the iPhone makes this tradeoff too. Sometimes explicitly (like when it tells you to be still for 1-2 seconds) and sometimes implicitly by hiding it from the user – I notice a lot of my nighttime interior shots with the iPhone are implicitly set to 1/15.
Images with Learnings
Feeling empowered by newfound knowledge, I went around the house shooting anything I could find. In addition to the titular image for this post, I found inspiration in my wife’s office.
And then just for fun, I decided to recreate that image with my iPhone’s camera:
It’s a pretty great shot for knowing nothing and just pressing a button. The iPhone continues to amaze me with its smart auto settings and really good processing. Maybe I’ll beat it someday :)