Let's Talk Tech
I loves me a fast prime lens! While I’ve been switching from Canon to Samsung for my video and photography production, I was happy to see a short telephoto with a super wide aperture. For those of you looking for prettier bokeh and crazy low light sensitivity, let’s take a look at Samsung’s NX 45mm f/1.8!
Got a great viewer question on my Instagram feed from follower kill.the.spiders who asks:
“Do you edit your photos or are they the way they are? The focus is amazing and the blur effect is impressive, also is it possible to make similar shots with phones, like the G3 for example?”
Let’s take a quick look at cameras, sensor size, and depth of field! This video should be watched full screen for the best experience, and don’t forget to increase the quality to 4K!
We’re just starting to review the NX1, but that doesn’t mean we can’t share some video samples! Samsung’s newest APS-C mirrorless camera is a beast capable of shooting true Cinema 4K resolution. Here’s an afternoon in Los Angeles shot in Ultra High Definition. Be sure to hit full screen, and toggle your quality settings to see every picture from this monster video file. Enjoy!
I’ll admit it. I’m a prime snob.
In moving from Canon to Samsung, I was worried about lens selection. While it’s certainly not as robust as Canon’s first party offerings, Samsung has some really decent glass to play with. Let’s check out one of the wider lenses available for this APS-C shooter!
Shop the 16mm f/2.4 Prime Lens for NX Cameras
Shop the Samsung NX30 Mirrorless APS-C Camera
Shop the Samsung NX1 Mirrorless APS-c Camera
Got a question on my iPhone Camera review from viewer Huber, who writes:
What’s up with the black bars when taking a picture with the iPhone?There are two black bars making the picture small, kind of like a square. All of the other phones the image takes up the whole screen.
That’s called “pillar boxing”. You know how some movies are SUPER wide screen and you see thin horizontal black strips on the top and bottom of your TV? That’s called “letter boxing”. Pillar boxing happens when the aspect ratio of a photo or video isn’t wide enough to completely fill the format it’s being displayed in.
In this case, the video window is 16×9, which is a pretty wide rectangle, but the iPhone shoots photos in 4×3, which is a really squarish rectangle. As that chunky pic can’t fill the whole video window, the software showing the photo adds the pillar boxing. If it didn’t do that, you would either have to crop and zoom in (which would defeat the purpose of me showing the pics in this video) or you would have to warp and stretch the photo to fill the widescreen view.
Cameras like those found on Samsung phones use natively 16×9 image sensors, so both photos and videos are automagically wide screen. Most other phones use an almost square sensor, so any widescreen photos or videos are the result of a crop.
Hope that answers your question Huber, and for more examples of pics and vids taken from all the phones we test here, make sure to follow on Youtube and Instagram!
I’ve really been enjoying my time with the Samsung NX30 which I picked up during their #DITCHtheDSLR event in Hollywood. It’s been a killer little mirrorless APS-C camera, and we’ve been using it recently to shoot our video reviews at 60FPS!
Well, you can’t really test an interchangeable lens camera without a couple extra lenses to interchange, so the fine folks at Samsung sent over a few for us to review, including their 45mm F1.8 3D lens!
I’m finding it’s actually terrifically difficult to share 3D files using traditional social networks, so I’ve set up a OneDrive folder where you can download the MPO files and view them directly via whatever method you prefer to use for 3D content. I’ve personally been running the files through an NVIDIA 3D Vision setup, and the shots are coming out much better than I would’ve expected for a consumer 3D solution.
Click on the folder or link below to see some of the 3D samples before we wrap up our review!
Photojojo’s Wide Angle Smartphone Lens has a neat trick. It can split in two, to become a macro lens. Especially for us folks NOT using the iPhone, this is a pretty handy camera accessory. Let’s get up close and personal with some macro shots from the Lumia 1020 and 1520!
Shop the Photojojo Wide Angle + Macro Smartphone lens on Amazon.
More info on Photojojo products.
The cameras found on Nokia flagship phones are certainly formidable, but no gadget is perfect, and there’s ALWAYS room for improvement.
Here’s how I (and others who have commented on this blog) would tinker with Nokia’s camera software.