Arches National Park - The Camera You Have With You

It is easy to find spectacular images online and I have little hope of competing with the pros. I thought I would take a little different approach with this post. When I take photos, I often use both an iPhone and a high-end camera (Canon 7D). I thought it might be kind of interesting to see if you can tell the difference. I will add four images I took today and before I comment more on my use of two "cameras", I want you to see if you can spot the images taken with the iPhone and which with the 7D.

First - the answers. The top two are iPhone images and the second were taken with the 7D.

This is not a fair test for several reasons. The images are shown here at the same size and at a reduced quality. I think it fair to say the reduction in quality was the same as all were uploaded at 80% quality. The other issue I would add is that the 7D is capable of many personal adjustments. I do the best I can and try to take advantage of some of these adjustments when I think the conditions warrant. For example, when I want a greater or lesser depth of field. Most of the shots today were in bright sun and often with dry, bleached vegetation. I tried to make adjustments as I took pictures. Just the brightness of sun made it a challenge just to use both the iPhone and the 7D because it was difficult to read what appeared on the screen when making adjustments or even when trying to examine the pictures as I collected them.

I like the message - "the best camera is the one you have with you". Whatever the advantage of a quality camera, most of us do not have it with us at all times.

Here are a couple things I would argue as advantages.

1) The iPhone can do panoramas and while there are other ways to create panos, I find the iPhone very easy to use for this purpose (first image).

2) Cameras typically allow the use of lenses suited to different purposes. I shot the final image with a high quality 70-200 telephoto. It was in the mid-90s today and the arch I wanted to photograph would have been a lengthy walk away. Shooting at a distance also allowed me to avoid including other tourists in the photograph.

One final issue. I use both a phone and a camera because of the geo-coordinate data the phone embeds with the image file. I can use this feature to precisely locate where an image was taken and by combining some phone images with my other photographs, I can come close to matching the locating of a shoot and even individual photographs.