I upgraded from an iPhone 6S to an iPhone 11 Pro a few days ago and I took the two phones out for a camera comparison experiment in Shinjuku. I was more focused on finding a variety of different environments to shoot in than on taking time to compose nice shots, but I think some of the results were pretty nice. Even if you’re not thinking of getting the new iPhone, I hope you enjoy the pictures! I’ve added details about editing, lenses, etc. where applicable. For this experiment, I looked at landscapes and cityscapes (so you won’t find any object closeups in this post). The edits I’ve made to these photos were done in an effort to replicate the scene as I saw it on that day. If you are looking for heavily filtered NEO TOKYO style pictures, you will be disappointed. I wanted to make these images reflective of everyday Shinjuku.
(P.S. This post is not sponsored by Apple or anything, haha.)
iPhone 6S. Slight edits to whites/blacks/contrast/saturation.
iPhone 6S. Significant edits to brightness/contrast. Slight edits to vibrance & saturation.
At this point, the battery on my 6S was at about 3% (for the record, I started shooting at 34%). Battery problems were actually the key factor influencing my decision to upgrade, actually. I wanted to make sure I could use the 6S for a couple more low light shots in the shiny-shiny evening streets of Shinjuku, so I opted to focus my time in the evening on the super wide angle lens and night mode options on the 11 Pro.
While this was an imperfect test in many ways, it’s pretty easy to see the level of detail (in terms of color and sharpness) provided by the 11 Pro. This was especially noticeable in the comparison of the front-facing camera in low light. The super-wide angle lens on the 11 Pro gives a super cool shot, but you sacrifice a great deal of quality. When I first noticed this, I thought it was just because my lens was just smudged, but even after cleaning, I got the same fuzzy results. It really helps capture the scale of places like a busy Shinjuku intersection, though!
Night mode also affected my photos. It comes on automatically in low light (but NOT on the front-facing camera or the super wide angle; only the standard back camera) and the phone uses the available light to determine how long to set the “exposure” for. Of course, this means you have to stand as still as possible when taking the photo, which can be tricky. I’d like to play around more with this feature and see if manual adjustments to the settings are possible (as many of my night mode shots were a bit on the fuzzy side). When the feature did work, however (like in the Shinjuku San-chome backstreet photo), it helped make my photos a bit more sharp and vibrant (usually when night mode was enabled for 1 second).
Some other notes: When the camera is on, for some reason the screen displays the regular photo frame PLUS all of the image you could capture with the super-wide angle lens. I found this really distracting and it made it more difficult for me to frame my photos as I wanted. I hope they include an option to remove this in a future update. There’s an option labeled 写真のフレームの外側を含めて撮影 in the camera settings, which means something like “include outside of image frame when taking photos.” I disabled this, thinking it might reduce the viewable on-screen imagery to JUST what was in the frame, but it did not. Alas.
I didn’t really test the portrait mode options much. When I explored the various portrait modes on a person (myself), I felt the filters looked really unnatural. I would prefer to photograph faces as they are naturally (i.e. unsmoothed by technology). I’m a bit concerned there’s some of that happening in the standard front-facing photos as well…
Overall, it’s exciting to be able to take such nice pictures! Quite a pleasant shock coming from the 6S. Taking photos was an enjoyable experience for a change. With the 6S my regular routine was to take TONS of photos and then go through the results to choose the best one (an extremely time-consuming process)! I’m looking forward to sharing lots more photos now! Hope you enjoyed these.
