The iPhone 14 Pro at the Billy Frank Jr. Wildlife Refuge
Since I’ve moved to Washington, I haven’t visited any of the nearby Wildlife Refuges, and that’s been bothering me. The nearest one to me is the Billy Frank Jr. National Wildlife Refuge, about an hour away, and while it’s early in the season for prime bird activity at the refuges, I decided to take a free day and head over to get a first look and more or less scout it to get some ideas of what to expect later into the winter.
Since I just got my iPhone 14 Pro and I’m (this time! really! ignore my previous three plans!) really trying to figure out how to use it as a “real” camera, it seemed a good excuse to go out and and explore the refuge with the iPhone as my main camera. I did carry my Sony birding rig on a sling, but it wasn’t really birdy (many Cackling Geese at a distance and the occasional Mallard) but the goal was to play with the iPhone as more of a wide angle and macro camera and see how I liked the quality.
One thing that’s tripped me up in the past is that when I’ve taken iPhone images and then moved them to Lightroom on the Mac to process, I haven’t been really blown away by the results. This one, for instance, is nice, but I just felt I couldn’t make it pop the way I could have if it were a Sony image. I’ve been here and there exploring how to manage iPhone images and process them natively before shifting the end result to Lightroom for catalogging.
This is a first experiment in that process. These were all processed in Photos on the iPad. I also have experimented just a bit with both the Lightroom iPad app and the Darkroom App, but I wanted to start with Apple’s app and so I could see if there’s a noticeable (to me) improvement with either of the others.
I should note that these images were taken with the Camera app, not a third party app (Halide is also on deck to experiment with seriously), and with Camera app default settings. Effectively I was in P mode here.
My initial take is pretty positive. The close focus/macro stuff is wonderfully painless to do and I think the results are nice. I think the sky is over saturated in that first image, but that’s on me, not the camera. The Photos app is — just fine — but I do think I want to explore third party alternatives and only use it for catalogging the originals, and how I want to organize this and keep the findable/separate from my personal/fun/casual shots in the photo library is still to be figured out.
There’s going to be some challenges keeping images in two catalogs and sorting things out so it all stays in sync and up to date, but I see ways to make that happen. And no, I’m not ready to move my main catalog out of Lightroom Classic to the cloud Lightroom yet.
With the holidays coming, I have some PTO scheduled and I plan on dodging raindrops and getting out and about and experimenting more with this. One thing I intend to do is shoot side by side with the Sony camera and do some pixel peeping between the two platforms, and with the iPhone images processed in the three apps I’ve gotten, plus in Lightroom Classic again so I can do some straight comparisons.
When I do, I’ll share the results with you. (and yes, this place has been pretty sparse with Photography content/writing since we started the move to Washington, but as you can see, life here has settled down, and the cameras are now much closer to the top of the priority stack again for me…)
