Macro with Samsung m8910

Shooting data: Samsung M8910 (camera phone), 4.6mm f/2.6, 1/580 f/2.6, ISO 50, handheld. Trebbia Valley, Italy.


I am a big fan of camera phones: I am always amazed by the results that you can get with the tiny camera of the phone. Few months ago, I bought a Samsung M8910 mobile phone: it has high resolution touch screen, wi-fi, GPS, a lot of applications, and...a 12 megapixel camera! I bought it mainly for snapshots, but the results were so good that I decided to try it even for serious photography. Of course, it does not make much sense to use the camera phone when you can use the reflex camera: instead, I have tried to take advantage of its peculiarities to get photos that I couldn't have taken with my Canon 7D.

The M8910 has a 4.6mm f/2.6 lens, that is equivalent to about 28mm when compared to 35mm fullframe, but unlike most 28mm lenses for fullframe, it has a very good macro capability. If you consider that it has also a lot of depth of field already at f/2.6, and it is easily handholdable, this camera phone allows to create unusual macro photos. Usually in my macros I try to get an uniform, out of focus background, while with the M8910 I tried to do the opposite: taking photos of the insect into its environment. It is much more difficult than the classic "clean background" approach, but sometimes the results are worth the effort! The photo that opens this article show the result that you can get. I have set the focus to "Macro", I disabled the flash and I have composed the photo to show the little butterfly in sharp focus, and the photographer into background. I have taken various photos: even with the huge depth of field of a camera phone, in macro mode you have to pay a bit of attention to get the entire subject in focus, so I have taken various photos from slightly different angles of view, and I have selected the best one after downloading the images on my PC.

The original photo was a 3.35 MB, 12 megapixels, sRGB JPEG file. Of course you can not post process it as much as a RAW files, but it is possible to do several improvements. Here, I cropped the photo to get 3:2 ratio (I really don't like the 4:3 ratio of camera phones and digicams), and I did minor adjustments of color and contrast. The final photo has a 3D look thanks to the wide angle perspective, and it shows well both the subject and the photographer at work!

One last thing: you will surely wonder if such photos are usable for professional usage. The answer is...yes! Even though it does not have the image quality of a SLR camera, it is about on par with many compact cameras; if there is enough light, you can get really amazing results. Here is a 100% crop from the previous photo:

...in case you have forgot it, we are talking about a camera phone! :-)

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