Iphone Or Digital Camera

Thanks. Now I'm gonna have dreams.

"No!! I don't need a screen saver!!! Leave me alone!!!!!!!!!"

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One of the photography features that I most enjoy with my iPhone is called Live Photo . What it does is capture a few seconds of video along with the photo. After you take the photo, it looks like an ordinary photo until you touch the screen with your finger, and then it animates with a few seconds of movement and sound.
When Robin and I were at the beach in Florida, and I took a Live Photo of her playing in the ocean. Just as I snapped the photo, she dived in the water, so on the Live Photo, I can hear the ocean waves and see my daughter diving in the ocean.
I have not heard of a feature like this on a regular camera; but maybe they can do this also ?

The photo can also be put on a loop, so it will play over and over like a video, if you want to do that with it.

 

I'm pretty sure it's just an Apple feature, that you can turned on & off right in the camera (to save storage.) One of the benefits I've read about Live Photo is that it captures a few seconds around your shot so if the pic did not come out perfectly (someone blinked at the wrong moment, etc), you can put that short video in an editing program and extract the frame that's the Perfect Pic. I had no idea there was audio with it.

If you need to free up space on your phone and you have all those little movies you don't want (it creates a video with every picture when Live Photo is turned On), you cannot just delete the movie and keep the pic...they are permanently attached to each other. I read that you can open the pic in the phone's editing app, make any slight change to it, save that edited pic under a new name and then delete the original pic/movie pairing. I only tried it once and it did not work for me...it made a duplicate pic/movie set.

I want to copy some of those pics to my laptop, then delete the pic/movie pairing on my phone, then copy pics-only back to the phone, but I cannot figure out what software I need on my Windows PC to copy pics to my iPhone. Pics go from the iPhone to the PC fine, but apparently you can't just drag them from the pc to the iPhone. The Verizon guy told me what software I needed but I forgot what is was as soon as I walked out the door.

 

This is a free photo editor that is quick and easy to use, and I use it a lot. It also seems to resize the photos so that they fit on the forum better. They might have the same thing for windows that you can use on your laptop ?

 

Thanks, I'll give it a shot.

You realize that your running your pics through that program before uploading them is why your pics are never rotated by the system. I wondered if you were doing something along those lines.

 

Very nice shot, John. Nice camera, too. I take it you shot this in RAW format.

Funny, I looked out my kitchen window this morning and saw a scene much like this one right at my front porch. If this is a favored subject matter, you'd have a blast on my property. Chock-full of critters. I sometimes take pics but with a Canon Power Shot SX260 HS. I've not studied the craft.

You've posted photos before (and one I believe that you sold) and discussed your photography, but I don't recall that you've mentioned if this has been a vocation or an avocation (or both) in your life. I have a sister who is very talented (does amazing black & white chalks in the Jon Gnagy style) and has done some photography. I believe she bought a couple of Ansel Adams prints and caught the bug.

 

Back to the OP's original question regarding how much the smartphone industry has cannibalized the stand-alone digital camera industry...it occurs to me that every smartphone includes digital camera optics (hence the premise of the topic.) Optics manufacturers now make a sale every time someone buys a phone. So for this segment of the digital camera industry, their customer base has exploded. There may (or may not) also be proprietary components/software by which other digital photography patent holders benefit from "all smartphones have cameras."

I skimmed a couple of articles on this subject and the consensus seems to be that dedicated digital camera sales (those that do not include phone functionality) are indeed declining, and smartphones are to blame. But there are also articles pointing out that some smartphone manufacturers are increasing the quality of the optics in their on-board cameras specifically to appeal to the photography market. In those instances, one might ask if the digital photography market is cannibalizing the phone market...that those who primarily want a quality portable digital camera are now getting the convenience of having a phone as the subordinate device, so they no longer go shopping just for a "phone." It seems logical that camera quality/functionality is the next cellphone differentiator, possibly creating a place for Canon and Nikon in this space.

None of this is new. In the early days of the computer industry, there were a ton of 3rd party peripheral manufacturers...sound cards, video boards, etc. Many of those businesses (Paradise, Boca, Hercules, etc) are long gone because mother board manufacturers started including sound & video chip sets that mirrored the dedicated 3rd party products. Like the cameras on smartphones, the quality was sufficiently close to that of the dedicated counterpart to meet the need. So while the "single function board" industry lost out, the component manufacturers (nVidia, for example) expanded their sales dramatically. It all gets blended...

 

So are you adept in manually setting the aperture and the f Stop on that RX10, or do you find that get sufficient utility sticking with the automatic settings in that high-end camera augmented by your Picture Software skills? I've been thinking of "upping my game," buy I'm not interested enough to bother taking photography classes in order to do so. Or are all the features of that camera so complex that I'd need a class just for it? (I see that it gets great reviews on Amazon.)

 

Sure does help, John.

I'm right there with you regarding speed & convenience when trying to get the fleeting shot. More important to this novice is not having to learn (and then mess with executing) "technical" camera settings in the field, substitute playing with "2nd and 3rd chance" software at my leisure.

Thanks for the feedback. Your pics are gorgeous, even on my cheap monitor.