Weather Photography: What's the difference between your phone camera and a "real one"

[pavelneuman]

Despite the megapixels and complex image processing algorithms phone cameras have these days, to shoot an amazing scene that is as close to reality as possible, you'll need to look after a professional camera.

Blake Heath, a Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia based photographer and weather geek, explains the difference. He gives you a nice example with his latest Grose Valley single-shot pictures he took on Tuesday the 30th of July.

Every digital image that comes out of a phone or camera has had many processes added to it by default (up to a million) as soon as you view it on the LCD screen.

So IMO, I like to get the scene as close as possible to how it was, when I was there - by working with f-stops, metering and the histogram etc to get a (hopefully) good exposure.

Its very hard not to over-expose the sky in images like this, so I find that spot metering works with my camera and the Canon 10mm - 18mm lense.

NB: These are single images, not blended HDR images.

If you're into weather photography (or in love with Blue Mountains), I strongly recommend you to follow Blake's work on Twitter or Facebook. Blake is also a regular contributor to the Weather Obsessed group on Facebook (that's where we've "met") — no surprise he earned a Conversation Starter badge there.

https://www.windy.com/annotation/5d42e4e09be2180019dbf40c

[Caefix]

https://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=12761.0
⛅ 📷 CHDK is another nice entrance to the topic, at least if You have an old Canon Ixus or Powershot. Btw. it´s not possible to use one of this cams as a webcam.

[deimos87]

@pavelneuman Yes. Today's phones smooths out too much of the pictures. It also adds information that never was there.

[Caefix]

📸 Photographic Firsts in Cyclone History