Filling up the Cabinet
Last week, I purchased a dry cabinet to store my camera gear. It was only today that I managed to get all my camera gears sorted out to fill the case up. It turned out to be too small. I should have gone for a bigger unit!
I dusted off my old DSLR, all the lens - minus a couple which I couldn't remember where I placed them - and all my compact cameras from the past.
I got them all cleaned and the batteries charged up. All except the LX3 were working OK. Not sure what happened to the Lumix. Hopefully it was all down to battery cell issues rather than anything more major. An old, but still capable camera. But as with all the early Lumix, it had this rather weird tinge on the jpg especially in low light. In needed plenty of work in post, but most of the time I just shoot in black and white.
I fired up the giant 7D, and shot a few frame. That was when I realised how inferior the white balance algorithm on the Canon compared to my staple, the Fuji. The X100 would more likely get the colours right, or just with minor tweaking. The 7D then went back into the cabinet ....
Now, everything were in order, inside the cabinet. While I was cleaning the bodies and lens, I decided to photograph them. The GR certainly did a great job here ....
Low Light Express
I must say I was expecting way thick from the iPhone 6 camera. The day I got my 6 Plus I took it to Pavilion to do some testing. Not in daylight but right after sunset. I really wanted to know how good it was.
There were plenty of people and more than enough subject keep me going. The lantern show was still on, and mixed with the lights at the fountain, it was quite a spectacle.
I got snapping straight away, alternating between the iPhone and the GR. The results? It was better than I expected. And the main reason was the optical image stabiliser. The shots looked crisp and the noise level was more than just acceptable. Not as good as the GR, but certainly no slouch.
Would it replace the GR in my pocket? Unlikely. Was it any better than the 5S. I wager to say that, it was not as big a jump between the 4 and the 4S. The main reason why the shots were successful was the image stabilisation system. You'd never be able to get the same shot on the 5S due the low shutter speed.
The image on the 6 Plus also appeared less contrasty as compared to the 5S. It was certainly easily rectified with apps such as Camera+. Otherwise the camera retained the 8MP sensor size, but I was sure much of the update happened under the hood at the software level.
Shooting speed was reasonable although the bigger size of the phone felt cluncky in my hands. If felt too big for me to position the shots freely, unlike the older iPhone or even my GR.
All in all, the iPhone 6 Plus still carried the reasonably good camera and with the addition of some software magic, the output still was among the best compared to other phones. I felt it better than the Oppo. From what I heard, the Lumia was still the King, and this latest Apple offering did little to knock the Windows phone off its perch.