Favorite iPhone Images from 2020

It’s that time of year to review last year and confirm a course for the next one. Are there places I should go more or less? The best camera is the one that’s in your hand… favorite iPhone photos from 2020, mostly #ShotOniPhone11 some #ShotOniPhone12.

Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Rainbows too!

Other photographic opportunities are a little more predictable, once you know what time the light will be just right.

A shaft of light selectively illuminates those young cottonwood trees four about 15 minutes each day. The exposure is tricky on a DSLR, but the iPhone seamlessly combines several exposures in an HDR result, to capture the full dynamic range of the scene.

After a daytime visit to Chaco Canyon, one of the closest places to camp was Angel Peak. I hadn’t heard of it before, but the badlands were interesting and sunset was stunning through wildfire smoke from the West Coast. Again, the iPhone captured an admirable result from a scene with extreme dynamic range from the sun to the shadowed badlands.

Snow can be difficult to capture. It’s so bright in the sunlight, and cameras can try to cancel out the reflected blue light, making the snow seem dull and brownish. The first time I noticed the blue in the shadows of a snow shot, I wondered if it really looked that way in real life. It does, it’s diffuse light from the blue sky, we just don’t necessarily pay attention to that sort of detail unless you look for it. iPhone doses an admirable job rendering snow with a natural look, and preserving the blue in the shadows.

Many fall colors locations are getting crowded these days, including the one above described on page 82 of my guidebook “Photographing California Vol. 2 – South”. Locations didn’t get crowded from decades of hardcopy guidebooks, the crowding happened with the rise of social media. Be careful what you share; you might have difficulty photographing some places upon your return. Even places you don’t expect to return to are worthy of anonymity, since everyone disclosing places they personally don’t expect to return to still results in exponential increase in visitation. The planet isn’t making these places like it used to.

Some places are protected by virtue of their remoteness, or via permitting systems that limit the number of visitors per day. The Wave is such a place. It’s a 7-8 mile round trip hike to reach, the access road to the trailhead can be a mess, and only 20 hiking permits are given out each day. It used to be fairly easy to get a hiking permit, but now it can take years to win the lottery to get a permit.

Tuolumne Grove in Yosemite National Park has a giant sequoia that you used to be able to drive through, now it requires a steep 2-mile round trip hike. Fires periodically clear out the vegetation around the trees, allowing new seedlings to grow, as well as dogwood trees that can be colorful in the fall.

Reflections can both represent and abstract a scene. Windows often provide the opportunity to blend the scene transmitted through the glass and the one reflected off the glass surface. There are repeatable opportunities as we visit Bodie for our night photography and interior access workshops, as well as the historic mining ghost towns we bring people to in Nevada.

As good as the iPhone 11 Pro Max is, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is better. I look forward to showing you more from Apple’s newest model in 2021.

It’s amazing how well iPhones can do with little effort, or with some slight adjustments in a program like Adobe Lightroom. Again, the iPhone 12 seems a little better than the iPhone 11. DSLR and mirrorless camera manufacturers should be paying close attention to what Apple is doing with its software, hardware, and application ecosystem. As amazing as the internal algorithms are within an iPhone, if I understood the product launch correctly, you can now export RAW files and the automatic edits that Apple applied to them. What a time-saver that would be on a DSLR, if it would provide a collection of preliminary post-processing adjustments along with one or more RAW files! Such features could also be built into Lightroom, but they’re stronger where they can influence the shooting parameters as well. A company like Adobe could design a program for that too. So could Apple. Can you imagine what Apple’s algorithms could do with current and future DSLR/mirrorless cameras?

The layered sandstone rock formations around The Wave are so diverse…

Once again, so good for a mobile phone image… and this is only the iPhone 11… and JPEG. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings on the iPhone 12, and shooting in RAW format!