The two huge new camera features are Night mode (software) and the Ultra Wide 13mm lens (hardware) and I’ve just spent a week testing these features extensively in my iPhone 11 Pro camera review, seen here.
In short, Night mode is all about taking better pictures in lowlight and it works super well but very differently than I expected. As a photographer familiar with traditional longer exposures, it was interesting to learn Night mode works by blending a bunch of short exposures shot over a period of time…it’s crazy computation photography stuff and I love shooting with it.
The other significant camera upgrade is the addition of the Ultra Wide lens. Now we have three lenses in our pocket, what Apple calls Ultra Wide (13mm), Wide (26mm) and “Telephoto” (51mm).
Shooting with the new Ultra Wide is a lot of fun and opens up some interesting possibilities.
The 13mm lens is useful for single photos but it also works pretty well in Pano mode. I hiked up to an overlook of fish ponds and the mountain range which made for a decent panorama so I shot a pano normally, with the standard Wide lens.
But I really wanted some texture in my foreground and after a few minutes of looking around I found some pretty interesting rock formations. Unable to get them in my shot with the Wide lens, I experimented with using the Ultra Wide lens in Pano mode to capture them.
While it’s certainly not distortion free, it was a cool way to play with this new lens and build a completely different image thanks to iPhone 11 Pro’s new Ultra Wide lens.
Another interesting feature photographers should take note of is the new “Capture outside the frame” setting which basically means if I’m shooting with the Wide lens, it’s also capturing with the Super Wide lens and I can use this extra information to adjust my crop out/correct geometry in post.
See the below screenshot where what used to be black is now transparent revealing the perspective of the wider lens for correction later.
It’s a different way of thinking about photography and in testing I found I like the extra power but it takes some getting used to.
This is just a quick glimpse of a few of the features photographers using iPhone 11 Pro should know about, so be sure to check out my full iPhone 11 Pro Camera review where I’ve extensively tested these new tools and many others on this shoot in China!
Hope you enjoy and please feel free to reach out with questions and comments over on my blog!
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