Reviews

A Second Perspective:
Living with the iPhone 7 Plus's Dual Cameras

Harry Zhang, Apr 30th, 2018

When I first got into photogrpahy with "real" cameras I quickly fell into the rabbit hole of equipment. I was reading an article on the merits of zoom lenses, which let you zoom in or out of scene, versus prime lenses, which only give you a fixed perspective, when I came upon this sentence that was a bit of a revelation:

"If you are taking photos with your phone, you are already using a prime lens."

The main camera on the back of the iPhone, the one that opens by default when you open the Camera app, has a wide-angle prime lens, about 28mm equivalent in camera terms. It gives a wider field of view than human eyes, which most agree to have a field of view closer to a 50mm lens. As a result, when we take a photo with that camera, we get an image that does not match what we see.


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People or things that seem at the right distance to us come out looking too far away; and if we walk closer, the image just looks a bit... off, because getting too close to a subject with a wide-angle lens distorts it.

I was often frustrated with that problem when I used the iPhone 6. When I took a photo of the subway station, for example, the pillars either came out looking more far away than they should have been, or looking comically large because I tried to step closer. It was something I constantly had to put up with.

Lines.

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Sure, we can zoom, but on phones that is basically stretching a part of the image and then making the phone guess how to fill in the gaps between pixels. It creates soft images that look terrible and those who care about image quality have been trained to avoid it.

So we are stuck with that single perspective, until Apple introduced the iPhone 7 Plus, which gives us a second camera on the back -- a lens Apple dubbed as "telephoto", but in reality gives a field of view of 56mm equivalent, close to the human eye.

That feature, along with the then-new (and turns out, unique to that generation) handsome matte black finish, sold me. I bought one less a month after it came out.

The iPhone 7 Plus finally gave me a camera that more closely matches the human eye.

Zooming, real zooming, on a phone is exciting. Gone was the horridly soft and noisy images when we pinch to zoom in that camera preview screen. Now, press the little "2x" button at the bottom, and what had seemed far away is suddenly pulled closer, without a loss in clarity.

Shots that were not possible before suddenly were. Photographers talk about "zoom with your feet", but I don't know of anyone who can zoom with their feet up a pole. Now that squirrel dancing off the wires is suddenly within reach.

This is where telephoto goes to work.

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Also within reach now were scenes far away. I had seen beautiful clouds biking along the riverside bike lane many times, but when I pulled out my phone, what I saw used to be a vast span of river and sky overwhelming that bit of dramatic overcast in the frame. Now I was able to get it, by pushing the little "2x" button on the screen.

Burning through.

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But the part of the experience that caught me by surprise was that it opened up a new subject matter for me: People. I have always been a shy person, and the iPhone's wide-angle lens meant that I had to get very close to people so that they don't appear tiny in the picture, something I was not comfortable with.

That was no longer necessariy with this second camera. When I push the "2x" button people suddenly seem to fill the frame properly at a polite distance. I guess that was also the reason why many street photographers start out with a 50mm lens.

Everybody has a life; some gets it harder than others. At Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where a majority black community and a Jewish community live on either side of a parkway, with what one community board member described as some racial tension.

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The first few months was a blast for me. I could zoom, I began to photograph people. All because of this second lens. I had started to wonder why Apple did not give me an option to make it the default camera to use.

But then I began to realize its limitations.

Real "zoom" on a smartphone was a tremendous enabler.

The iPhone camera had seen almost a decade of evolution when the iPhone 7 Plus was introduced. The iPhone started out with a fixed-focus 2 megapixel camera that produced terrible images. Since then, Apple has added larger sensors, higher resolution, fast autofocus, brighter apertures that let in more light, and optical image stablization that compensates for hand shake so that the camera can take a longer exposure to capture more light.

All those improvements, however, went to the "main" camera, the wide-angle one that has shaped the look of smartphone photography for nine years. The new focal length of the second camera was unprecedented in the smartphone space, and it shows in its technical inferiority.

It has a smaller sensor than the wide-angle camera, which means that it alone captures less light to begin with. It has a smaller aperture, f/2.8 versus the f/1.8, which means it lets in less than half of the light compared to its more historied counterpart. It does not have optical image stabalization, which means that if you are shooting with this lens, you will need a shorter exposure than its wider sibling, letting in less light.

These deficiencies mean that the iPhone 7 Plus's second camera ultimately lets in much less light than the wide-angle camera, which means that it produces worse images in low light. The difference was so drastic, apprarently, that Apple decided to disable the second camera in low light -- in which case, pressing the "2x" button makes the phone digitally zoom in on the wide-angle camera, as if the second camera does not exist at all.

I took a photo of the live reporting scene on the 2016 election night using the longer lens, or so I thought. The photo came out the way I envisioned, but upon a closer look everything seemed a bit smeared and soft. It turned out that Apple did the digital zoom trick on this one.

This madness called election night coverage is definitely impressive for someone who's never seen anything like this.

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Even when Apple deems it appropriate to use the longer lens, the light deficiency can show. On a rainy day I went for a lunch break neglecting to bring my umbrella. When I came out of the restaurant, it was pouring. I stood under some scaffolding for shelter, which also happened to nicely frame a few store fronts and conversing people across the street. I pulled out my phone, switched to the longer lens, aimed and pressed the shutter. The phone captured the mood I wanted, but the photo seemed a grainy and soft. The camera had cranked up the sensitivity on the sensor to compensate for the gloomy day, at the cost of noise.

Rainy conversations.

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As I became familiar with the second camera I found myself pulling out the phone, opening the camera, pressing the "2x" button, and then putting the phone back to sleep without taking a picture, because I just knew that the second camera would not do the scene justice for me. Sometimes I just had to get closer to get the shot, or admit to myself that my phone could not capture what had I hoped to. Smartphone photography has always been about compromise. The second camera took away some, but gave me some new ones.

The second camera lags the "main" camera when it comes to image quality due to the young age of its genre, and I can't trust it to get the shot the way I can with the wide camera.

A few months in with the iPhone 7 Plus, I had fallen into some kind of routine in which I see a scene, open the camera, look at the preview, click the "2x" button, look at the preview again, and then take a picture at whichever the better focal length was, or not take a picture at all.

That routine suited me well for a while, until last summer, when I got an internship where I worked near South Ferry. I biked to work from my Upper West Side apartment every day through the bike lane next to Hudson River. The view of the New Jersey shoreline when I glanced to the side, as well as the skyline of downtown New York when I looked straight ahead, was amazing.

I snapped photos on the way to and from work every day. It was a good time, until I realized that I have been shooting the same things the same way. My vantage point never changed -- each scene has always been seen from the same spot on the bike lane -- and mere focal length changes could not make up for that.

It was in this period that I learned to move, to shoot actively.

The One World Trade Center could be seen on the bike lane through the wide lens, which would mean that the bike lane itself will end up in the image. Or I could get off the bike, push it over to the walk next to the river, and frame the shot from there using a longer lens.

#notamorningperson

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A very tall building.

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The building came out roughly the same size in the two shots, but the wide shot gave a sense of scale contrasting the skyline with the biker, while the tight shot emphasized the homogeneity of the concrete jungle that is downtown New York -- I hoped.

I also learned to frame a subject dramatically differently, depending on the mood of the scens, using both focal length and vantage point. The following two shots of the New Jersey skylines both came out well.

A look at Jersey City. #notamorningperson

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Sauron' eye. | Last day seeing this scene for a while.

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I realized that the second camera does not give me a chance to replace "zoom with your feet" with "zoom with your lens". What it gives me, instead, is the ability to zoom with my feet at two different focal lengths. It is a second tool in the shed that can be used independently, rather than an add-on that aims to extend the original tool.

I learned to use the longer lens not as a crutch to magnify the subject, but as a separate tool that allows for completely different framing possibilities.

It has been a year and half since the iPhone 7 Plus has been introduced, and I am surprised that a second camera with a longer focal length still have not received much traction among mainstream smartphone makers. For me personally, it has been the biggest development in smartphone photography since the iPhone 4 introduced the idea of a "good" smartphone camera to the world.

Since I have been posting to Instagram from my phone on a daily basis for over a year, I did some analysis on my use of the two cameras. The result was interesting, to say the least.

More than a third of the photos I posted to Instagram since I bought the iPhone 7 Plus were been shot with the second camera, and this result is not counting in cases where the phone digitally zoomed in on the wide camera when I attempted to use the longer camera in low light. For a camera that is likely inferior to the iPhone cameras five years ago (the iPhone 4S's camera had a brighter f/2.4 aperture) in terms of image quality, it has shown tremendous value, at least for me.

It gives me more freedom to frame my shots, and taught me a valuable lesson about photography along the way: the tools does not make the shot by themselves; they merely enable it. With some thought and two perspectives to choose from, everyday sights in New York, such as rainy days, can be captured in so many different ways.

Crossing.

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Raining. . . . #shotoniphone #nyc #nycsubway #streetphotography

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I plotted out all of my posts with the iPhone 7 Plus, and it confirms what I have felt about the second camera over time: there were periods that I relied on it, especially near the beginning, but I am, hopefully, moving towards a phase where I am no longer using the zoom as a clutch when I am far away from my subject, but as a considered choice of how much dimensionality to include in a photo.

And I think I have been improving. My daily life has mostly been a tight loop, bounded by my fixed schedule as a student, but I have managed to see different scenes of beauty or significance in the routines that I counter daily, and capture them on my phone. The subway, the streets, the weather -- the different people and mood give them fascinating variances, and I have a second focal length to emphasize them all.

Dystopian time machine. (AKA NYC subway) . . #shotoniphone #nycsubway #colors #dystopia

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Finding company. . . #shotoniphone #nycsubway #mood #blackandwhite

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Good morning.

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Middle of the road. . . #shotoniphone #nycstreets #streetphotography

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It’s snowing once more (I guess?) . . #shotoniphone #streetphotography #nycstreets #storm

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Hailing in the storm. . . . #shotoniphone #streetphotography #blackandwhite #storm

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When I learned to use the second camera judiciously, it gave me a bit more of something that has always been lacking in smartphone photography: freedom.

If I were to summarize the experience with the dual cameras in one word, it would be "freedom".