A journal following the history, design, construction and operation of Bernard Kempinski's O Scale model railroad depicting the U. S. Military Railroad (USMRR) Aquia-Falmouth line in 1863, and other model railroad projects.
©Bernard Kempinski All text and images, except as noted, on this blog are copyrighted by the author and may not be used without permission.
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March 11, 2022

Testing iPhone 13 Pro Ultra Wide Lens

 I bought a new iPhone 13 Pro today to replace my battered iPhone 10. I had read a lot of great  things about the new iPhone 13 cameras so I thought I would take some test shots using the new ultra-wide lens. 

 



This is a basic shot using 5 exposures with photo stacking and the ultra wide lens. The resulting image has great depth of field. But there is an obvious barrel distortion in the image. Note how the track seems curve up and down as it crosses the bridge. I could not find a lens correction plug-in for this lens in Photoshop 2022 or Lightroom 2022.  I hope Adobe will offer one soon. Note that this image includes the built-in lens distortion correction that comes with the iPhone 13 as a user selectable setting. I tried fiddling with the liquify plug-in and the perspective tools in Photoshop to get rid of distortion, but didn't have good results. 


Here is a brief video of the same scene. This looks pretty good. The barrel distortion is not as obvious in this image, possibly because I moved a little back from the scene. 


iPhone 13 Pro Macro mode

The camera has many settings and modes. The macro feature is intriguing. It works mostly through software processing. 

I found that if the auto-macro option is selected, it is difficult to take a series of shots to focus stack. That is because the  lens switches the focal length as it jumps into macro mode. So the image cannot be aligned. However,  I was able to take the shot below by disabling that feature and manually selecting my focus points. 

I had to replace the sky in this image as the painted sky on the coved corner did not look right with such a wide angle shot. Still, I think it is an interesting shot. There will be several new images I can shoot with  this wide angle lens so close to the modeled ground, i.e. to get the worm's eye view.















This was the first ultra-wide angle shot I took. The focus stacking worked pretty well, but the contrast in the image was too much. This is the result even after I adjust the contrast way down.



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2 comments:

  1. Dave EgglestonMarch 14, 2022

    Of even greater interest to me is that I think the 13 has depth of field adjustment. This would be amazing for model photography which really suffers in this area. I'll be interested in your thoughts if that feature is there.

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    1. BernieMarch 14, 2022

      I haven't played with that feature that I think is available in Cinematic video mode only. If I understand correctly it allows you to simulate racking the focus in videos after you shoot them, which is pretty amazing. However, that techniques is not that useful for model railroad photography or videography were we don't want the shallow depth of field, i.e. the some called bokeh effect, but rather deep depth of field to make our miniatures look real. I discussed that phenomena in an earlier post on hyperlocal. See here https://usmrr.blogspot.com/2014/05/depth-of-field-in-macro-focus-range.html

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