Cell Phone Photography in Barcelona
- Oct 10, 2017
- 2 min read
Last week my family and I spent three days in Barcelona. We bought last minute tickets and managed to land on the day that the Catalan referendum took place (October 1st) and left Barcelona two days later while the whole region was on strike. This was inconvenient from a traveling perspective, as museums and sites were closed, however it provided some interesting photographic opportunities as many locals (and tourists) were walking around the streets wearing Catalan flags in protest.
A few days prior to our trip I've purchased some add-on lenses for my cell phone which I hadn't had much of a chance to use. This trip was a great opportunity to test them as well as put my cell phone camera to use. Generally I use my Nikon DSLR, however, I was interested to see how a phone camera compares. In this post I will share some pictures I've taken in Barcelona using my Samsung S7 cell phone camera with and without my fish-eye add-on lens as well as photos I've taken on my Nikon D7000. The photos taken on my cell phone have been edited on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom app which I've recently discovered. The basic app is free and is a really cool tool for anybody who wants to take their cell phone photography to the next level. Of course the photos taken on my Nikon are edited in the computer version of Lightroom. In a future post I'll discuss my Lightroom editing process for both the computer and cell phone.
The following are photos taken on my phone's camera with and without the add-on fish-eye lens:
If you look closely at the edges of the following photo, you can see that the edges of the picture are a bit blurry. Or, in other words, the focus is best right in the middle. This has to be taken into consideration when using this lens.
The following pictures are similar images taken with my DSLR using a Tokina 11-16mm, F2.8 lens and with my phone using the fish-eye add-on lens:
As you can see, the photos taken with the DSLR are sharper, however, in most cases, the pictures taken on cell phone are quite decent considering the lack of control of F-stop and shutter speeds and lower level lenses.
In the following photo, the quality of the cell phone photo is significantly lower. This is likely because the focal point (the bar) is distant and the room is dark and required a slightly longer exposure - both causing a lack of sharp focus. Together with the blurry edges, the photo taken on the cell phone lacks the sharp focus we would generally expect to see.
All in all the cell phone camera takes relatively high quality pictures (with or without add-on lenses). For me this was useful to know as many times pulling out your phone is quicker than pulling out a camera. In addition, various add-on lenses can give you different photography options with your phone at very reasonable prices, making cell phone photography a great addition to your photographic repertoire.
Keep up the good light!
Yehonathan
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