Commentary: December 2022 Archives

So I got myself an iPhone 14 Pro for Christmas.  It arrived in store on the 23rd and I picked it up Christmas Eve.  Considering they thought it would be mid January before one turned up it was pretty good.  Setup was super simple.  Turn it on, it says put the old phone near by, enter the password and off it goes (with a few extra wizard steps).  But no having to fart-ass around with iTunes which was lovely.  Copied everything perfectly.  Well except a couple of apps that won't run because they're no longer in the app store.  Really must remember to retrieve a few passwords out of minikeepass before I blat the old phone.  

The first photo on it, fittingly enough, was our Christmas lunch.

Not sure if you can tell, but I don't think it looks great.  In fact, I was playing around with taking photos on it, and really nothing looked good.  Most of my closeups were out of focus, or processed within an inch of their life.  hrmmm.  

Boxing Day I was outside and noticed this tiny little bug on the fence.  I tried to get a photo of it.  I struggled.  This was about the best I could get.

I was not impressed.

Tuesday I took it to the Botanical Gardens and was taking photos on it, and pretty much failing most of the time to get anything decent.  

But there were some wins

So I watched a couple of videos and read some stuff.  

And had a bit more of a play. 

First things first, enable the macro controls so you can at least *see* when it's enabling macro mode (and changing to the wide angle lens).  The trick is that *without* macro mode you can't get all that close, it simply won't focus.  So you have to use macro mode as is, or stand back.

I also did a heap of playing outside.

First lesson learned: don't use the 2x lens.  It's just a digital zoom of the 1x lens and it's crap.  

Second: while the macro mode will in fact get right up close, you won't get a blurry background so it's crap for photos of flowers.  Use the 3x instead.

Here's a couple of examples.  The top ones are using macro, while the bottom ones are using 3x lens.  So much nicer on the 3x.

The macro will work really nicely sometimes

But yeah for flowers just use the 3x

The other thing I tried out was the night mode.  This is under the house where it's really quite dark.  This is a three second exposure.  HAND HELD!!  Will need to get some sort of tripod for it and really test it out.

Another interesting thing I found (well a commenter in a YouTube post did) is that if you choose the 3x lens, then get too close, it'll actually flip back to the 1x lens.  And you can tell because you can move a finger or something in front of the different lenses and see that it's using not the one you expect.  But my old phone does this too as it turns out.  

As for the rest of the phone, no idea really.  It's a computer in my pocket.  Works much the same as before.