Comment by dsego
1 day ago
Moving from the Fuji x-t30 with an 18-55 kit lens (and a couple of primes) to x100vi showed me how less impressed everyone around me is with my photos. While I find the x100vi really fun to shoot with and it simplifies my setup, it really makes it difficult to get photos that won't look like phone snapshots and that ordinary people can appreciate. Everyone loves that uncluttered professional look with out-of-focus backgrounds and compression. Zooming with your feet is not always possible and the same for getting close, getting too close to fill the frame with a 35 equivalent sometimes just ruins the moment. The wide lens also just make things look smaller than we see them, so tall buildings and high mountains aren't as dramatic in the pictures as in real life.
Phones exaggerate textures and flatten lighting, so when shooting at similar angles I like some of these things:
- challenging lighting. The phone will give you a more legible out-of-the-box processing, but is there a better photo if you let the background be blown out, or the foreground be in deep shadow?
- shots with textured things where the difference between the "sweater effect" sharpening and "natural" texture becomes apparent in a "reduce the eye strain from everything being hyper-sharpened" way
- night shots generally - it's been nearly ten years since long-exposure-blur-reduction night modes on phones, and they have a very specific look that's pretty different and generally fairly artificial when you see alternatives
- high shutter speed / motion - especially in lower lighting where the phone is gonna choose less noise
- cropping; make use of the bigger sensor and more pixels compared to the phone
lightroom and similar other tools with modern noise reduction systems go along way to get wow-factor out of handheld high-iso raw files compared to camera stabilization/processing