MobilityLeaks: Simmons Sets New Tl;dr Record

On 10/7/2011 10:34 AM, The Fight wrote:

A backlit f2.2, 8 MP sensor? (link)

And here I was going nuts after seeing the 4S with a damn f2.4. 

So many questions:  – What the hell is Nokia going to come out with? 
– Is anyone going to beat that Panasonic Lumix phone 101P?

There’s picture samples on neowin’s site too.

Sent from my Windows Phone

David K:

I’ll just leave this right here

Jeremy:

I have already been getting the wife ready to take my Arrive once she can upgrade her phone.  Look hunny a keyboard that you can type on and look at how much faster this thing is compared to your Hero..  

I cannot believe how slow the Hero is now..  When she first got it I thought it was awesome (I was still using BB at the time) just over a year later and having WP7 that thing is frustratingly slow. 

Doug Simmons:

For those of you wondering what guys like Evan mean when they say f1.4, f5.8 etc, that is a reference to the lens of a camera and how wide its aperture, the pupil or iris of the camera lens basically, is able to expand when taking a picture in order to let in more light. More specifically, it is the lens’s focal length, the distance of how far away the subject of the photograph must be from the camera in order to be in focus I believe, divided by the diameter of the aperture when fully opened. 

In other words, the smaller the f-stop number, the better in that the camera has the ability to capture more light which for most people taking pictures, like with their phone, means they can get a better shot in lower light conditions without the camera needing other aids to get the right lighting like leaving the shutter open for a longer period of time, which creates blur, or ups the digital equivalent of the film speed, the ISO, how sensitive to light it is, as the higher you bump the ISO the grainier the shot becomes, and fires flash which may light up your foreground but light dissipates exponentially so you have a bright foreground and everything else is significantly darker.

Sometimes in darker lighting flash photography someone who knows what he’s doing will fire the flash but leave the shutter open for a little while in order to normalize the light of the background versus the foreground, or aim the flash away from the subject in order to more evenly spread the light and make it appear ambient. With some cameras you can open the shutter and fire the flash just before the shutter closes as opposed to the beginning. All that can be helpful, but being able to take indoor shots without a flash, without too much blur and without too much grain can be accomplished with a good lens with a low f-stop and, nowadays, with cameras that can compensate for sub-optimal exposure and grain with software tricks, being able to do that, especially with your phone, is a special, valuable thing. Matters much more, being able to pull that off, than getting a couple extra megapixels.

One thing that could go either way as an advantage when taking a picture, depending on whether you’re just fun-snapping and want the odds of whatever you’re shooting, everything in the frame including foreground and background, to be in focus to be maximized (tight aperture) or if you’re an artsy professional taking a birds eye shot of a bumblebee hovering a few inches above a flower toward you and you want the bumblebee to be in focus but the tulip or whatever to be out of focus. That’s called depth of field, how wide (or narrow ftw) your focal length is, or how surgically you focus on something while leaving other things out of focus. A shallow depth of field makes a picture look impressive when done right:

You get a shallower depth of field by opening up the aperture, which you can do better when you’ve got a lens with a aperture capable of dropping the f-stop down below two or so. But when you do that, that means more light hitting the film (or digital sensors), so the camera, or you if you’re doing it manually, needs to speed up the shutter or user a lower ISO by the same factor you manipulated the f-stop in order for the shot not to be overexposed because you wanted a narrower depth-of-field as this is called, tightening the sweet-spot away from you between which things are in focus.

Shooting an SLR manually, taking control of these things, is like driving stick shift. In high school I had a manual analog Nikkromat SLR, no auto focus, busted light meter, and eventually got the feel for where to twist these settings on film of varying speeds to get the effect I wanted. Didn’t have to do math all the time, you just sort of get a feel for it. The only math I had to do was how much it cost me each time I fired the shutter, had to make each shot count. Today though, with a proper DSLR camera, if you want to get into the depth of field game, you just tell the camera to let you mess with the aperture but adjust the film speed on the fly (which you couldn’t do with regular film) along with the shutter. Easy, especially since with these fancy cameras you’re able to use a very high ISO and not get any noticeable grain. However if you’re a badass, particularly with black and white photography, you want grain. That, among other things, is what photoshopping is for. Post production.

One trap you gotta watch out for though with shooting like this with a wide-open lens is that if it’s too bright the camera may not be able to slow down the film speed and speed up the shutter enough and you’ll end up with a few hundred overexposed shots, which sucks. And if you go zoom lens shopping, note that the f-stop the description boasts is how wide you can open it when fully unzoomed. As you zoom in, which you’ll probably do at least a little for most of your shots, your aperture won’t open as wide so be mindful of that when shopping. For an important shoot do a test run, especially if you’re pulling stunts like using a flash in such a bright setting to fill in shadows.

Note that with telephoto zoom and fixed lenses the more top-end magnified the lens you’re dealing with can shoot, the higher low-end f-stop you’re dealing with. A 50mm lens with an f-stop of 1.4 is normal, a 105mm with over 2 is normal, though if you throw more money at it you can get a lens with a lower f-stop. Tends to be the biggest factor in cost of getting one lens of a certain mm versus another of the same. People like their f-stop low on zoom and fixed lenses.

Tl;dr the lower the f number the better, and f2.2 as Evan reported some phone as having is so impressive for a phone lens that I feel like I need to go read wikipedia to make sure I’m understanding this right. Also, the other takeaway for you here is that I know more than you thought I did about photography.

This sprint investor thing is going slowly.

Jeremy:

 

In terms guys can understand..  

Better booty shots at all times of the day at quicker rates.

Smith:

Simmons would you please post this? This is great info.
Sent from my iPhone 4

Fight:

Ok, A few things.
1.  Well said, Simmons.  I attached a lil pic for those that need "enrichment."2.  Confused about cameras in general?  goto DPReview.com well,  really you should go here.

3.  One of the few things I’ve was proud of in my retail career was being a Nikon recognized trainer for Circuit City.  I say that to say this, f-stops aren’t everything to the point and shoot folks but they should be.  That and for those folks who drink and take pictures, OIS. 

4. I seriously doubt that there will ever be a full frame camera phone although, if any two companies could try it, I would have to believe it would Panasonic and Nokia. 

5.  Seriously, guys take a look at this damn phone.