In the Future
From now on, or at least for a while, I won’t be mentioning which camera I used to make pictures, except from a “handling perspective.” More on that a little further down.
I used both the Apple iPhone 6 and the Fuji X-T1 with the 27 mm lens to make many images of a single bird’s nest. I then moved the images into LR6 CC and adjusted them somewhat independently. My primary objective was to learn how the different images handled with respect to tweaking them so I moved a lot of sliders, etc. as I played with them. I then created the monochrome images with Silver Efex Pro. The above are two sets of a few of the images.
Throughout the exercise I continued to forget which camera was used to create which one, and I had to keep going back and check to make sure I was working with images from both cameras in the creation of the above pairs. When working with the images, the biggest difference was the number of pixels I had to work with, and thus how much I could crop. The differences between working with a jpeg image and a raw file were slight. They are different and they have different characteristics with respect to coloring, etc. in addition to the differences in focal lengths, depth-of-field, etc.
The primary difference other than lens and size is in their handling or what I call usability. It is nice to be able to have a camera in your pocket, most of the time. One of the unexpected major differences for me was the focal length effects. I am referring to the fact that while out walking, I found that the small lightweight iPhone was often a “back breaker.” If I wanted to get an image of a leaf on the ground, I had to bend down low to the ground. This is not a pain-free easy exercise for me. In the future if I am out looking for up-close details, I will try to take the X-T1 with a longer focal length lens so that I don’t need to bend as much.
Due to the superb controls, interchangeable lenses, larger sensor, etc. I will try to use my X-T1 for my “intentional photography”; but, I have no qualms about pulling my iPhone 6 out of my pocket to make images of opportunity. In addition, I will use my iPhone whenever I can’t, or don’t wish to, carry my X-T1, and/or when I wish to produce a series of images from just the iPhone.