I was on holiday in Greece recently when I shot this photo inside the Cathedral in Athens.
I shot this using an Olympus EM5 Mark 3 with Panasonic Leica 8-18mm at 8mm. The exposure is handheld at 1/10 second using f/5.6 and ISO3200.
It took me a lot of messing around before I could shoot this. I needed to change the lens because the one I was using wasn’t wide enough. I then needed to adjust the camera settings and take test shots until I was happy that I could handhold the camera. I then needed to line up the sun in the dome’s window.
It took me 4 to 5 minutes to capture this image, along with several deleted test shots. As you can imagine, my wife became bored and wandered outside, encouraging me to follow her. Then, as she reappeared at the door of the cathedral with a look on her face that asked only one question (where are you), I whipped out my iPhone and shot this next image.
There was no thought involved, and it took me about 5 seconds.
The iPhone shot is with an iPhone 15 Pro using the wide-angle lens. The exposure is 1/25 second at f/2.2 and ISO800. Best of all, I didn’t need to think about this. I just composed the photo and let the iPhone work its magic.
After that, I started using my iPhone to take photos for the rest of the holiday.
Food for thought.
The Lightweight Photographer 
I can relate. I am now in Bari in Italy and wish I had my phone rather than my Canon EOS. Just too heavy but great shots.
I have some friends doing a tour of Italy at them moment. They were in Rome when you were but I haven’t heard where they are for a couple of days. Is it a group tour or are you selg guided? It might be a very small world and a big coincidence.
my friend and I are doing a trip we planned prior to Covid. She is fluent in Italian ( thank goodness) and we are both in our eighties. Travelling for 6 weeks and destination is Palermo in Sicily. We like to do,our own thing – lots of art galleries and museums etc. I brought my Canon so I could do some multiple,exposures but my Fuji might have been the better bet. Or my iPhone!
Have fun. Palermo is wonderful. I had the best arancini I had ever tasted there. The ice cream wasn’t bad either.
very much food for thought Robin. I have a full frame Canon for my property photography work but got fed up with the weight on holiday so bought a small Canon mirrorless (M6mkII) which took fab pics but I got fed up with coming back with 2 or 300 pics to edit! The pics were really only great if edited, straight from camera weren’t. I did that for a good few years then saw your iPhone pics and needing a new phone went down the same route. It doesn’t feel the same but is so liberating, I love it. It’s actually given me a bit of a renewed interest in my full frame.
It’s interesting that it’s renewed your interest in full frame. I’ve had a similar experience. I’ve also ended up buying a lot of photography apps for my iPhone. I love the results.
aaah, what I have done is bought the Fjorden attachment and app. Still playing with it at the moment but honestly the processing the phone does is so good I probably really didn’t need to. Wonder how the 16 has improved things but more than happy with 15 Pro Max.
iPhone cameras have their place…the “camera” you always have with you. Great for social media. Rarely good enough for clients and/or for hanging something on the wall.
The only thing I disagree about is that you can produce some pretty good prints from the latest iPhones. I don’t claim that they are as good for making huge prints but they can look pretty impressive.
I disagree. Try Topaz Gigapixel and keep the viewing distance (at ~long side x1.5)
A very relatable story, makes you think that maybe we all should have found a partner who also does photography 🙂
But even your solution is familiar, although I do it slightly differently – I set the M5III to auto or even to a scene mode and just shoot – for this, I find the Olympus 9-18mm amazing. Maybe not as wide or light-sensitive, but soooo compact that you can fit the M5 in your pocket. In any case, I’ve learned to always give priority to my wife 🙂
Great photo by the way!
Have a nice weekend, Marc.
Yes, I succumbed to her suggestion of a café after this to smooth the water.
Very recognizable, except I don’t have a wife but an impatient partner. I was always told I had ‘a good eye’ to which I always answered that I was glad to have two great eyes, but I did learn all about techniques to capture the image I saw the best way possible. Photography is many things to many people, I know photograpers who have the most expensive equipment and the knowledge, but their photo often are clinical and lacking atmosphere. So if it’s about capturing that creative moment you spot, with less effort and a happy partner, perhaps help from advanced technology is the way to go.
Oh Robin. A scenario I recognise very much! But yes…. this is where I have found myself heading – the mirrorless and lenses keep staying in the cupboard and I take my iPhone instead. Being what I call an ‘opportunist’ photographer rather than doing planned photo outings works very well for me with the latest iphone devices and third party apps and choices of format and resolution. It becomes a new area of challenge, one not to be sniffed at by purists. Yes you can snap & grab but also use all your skills and the adjustments provided by apps to get the image you want – depending on what you want to do with it later. There’s plenty to debate here. I’ve tried various apps, I’ve tried add-on lenses (faffy overkill and back to an admittedly small camera bag), I use a lot of Pro Raw and just Raw where appropriate and process most shots in Lightroom. And a lot of the time I wonder why, when the computational work that Apple does can often give an excellent photo that can still be adjusted to a degree in LR if needed. So there are still plenty of creative choices to be made by the user and if you just need to grab the shot you know you can do it.
So I guess my journey is currently taking me further down the road of a ‘lightweight photographer’. My primary joy – ‘seeing’ the shot, imagining the potential, capturing and framing the raw material on the phone, getting creative in Lightroom etc is all still there. It creates whole new technical challenges, of course; battery life (carry a MagSafe battery); mobile network data management; Apple Photos and Lightroom DAM nightmare confusions for starters. But that’s what keeps the grey matter going eh?
I have the 16 Pro on order and hoping that the addition of 48mp wide and 5x zoom will help me leave my Reeflex lenses at home… we shall see.
It will be interesting to see what happens when your new phone arrives.
I used to carry a high end compact camera for moments like this but that was replaced by my phone. To be honest, I don’t miss the compact and the iPhone does a great job much of the time.
Why bother with the discipline when you can achieve it in an instant? We all get on board with the Gen Z mindset eventually. 🙂
Nothing prevents you shooting in Auto mode with a camera without thinking too much, small camera and a fixed prime or small standard zoom and done. 🙂
That’s true but… I don’t have a prime lens for my travel camera and I tend to carry just one or two zooms because they are easier to travel with. When I began messing around with the camera settings, I eventually switched to auto but then the limit on the ISO was set too low so I had to change that. It was still a lot of fiddling around in the menu system of the camera (one of it’s weaknesses). Much easier to use my iPhone and the quality is good. The iPhone also caught the sun burst in the window and the light rays where the camera didn’t.
I know exactly the feeling you had there. My wife is always on that same energy. The iPhone pictures look good on the phone and can be ok on the computer too, as long as the photos isn’t viewed in a larger size. I find once you look at an iPhone photo in a larger size you can see it falling apart in the details. In your example they both look good when viewed small, so I think if you’re just sharing them in a small format the iPhone is good. But in your situation on holiday it’s definitely a welcomed option to not annoying your travelling companions.
The iPhone definately has it’s uses and limits. I’ve had some great results from it and in good light it can produce huge high quality prints. I did some testing of shots I made in Dubai and then processed using Topaz Photo AI. I was able to make an 90″ print from a 12 MP image because it was in good light and the image was full of buildings. It isn’t as good with nature subjects like landscapes.