Photographer Austin Mann puts iPhone 12 Pro through its paces

Credit: Austin Mann

As he does every year, travel photographer Austin Mann took Apple's new iPhone 12 Pro for a test drive in the great outdoors — this time at Glacier National Park in Montana. Here's how it went.

Over the past few years, Apple has provided Mann with iPhone models to test out prior to release, including the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone XS.

This year is no different, and Mann was granted the opportunity to take the new iPhone 12 Pro for a spin in both bright and inclement conditions.

The iPhone 12 Pro, however, features mostly incremental and software-based changes to its camera suite. Most of the significant hardware changes are only arriving on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which Mann hasn't gotten his hands on yet.

But the smaller iPhone 12 Pro model still performed admirably in a variety of conditions. The addition of Night mode on the wide lens, for example, has significantly bolstered the low-light performance of that lens.

Previously, Mann said that the "found the quality of the Ultra Wide wasn't up to my standards when shooting in medium- to low-light conditions, so I only used the Ultra Wide in bright, daylight conditions." But the Night mode has helped mitigate those drawbacks.

Credit: Austin Mann

Mann also praised some of the improvements to Smart HDR with the iPhone 12 Pro. For example, the ability to shoot a silhouette has been updated with the latest handset, since doing so was difficult in the previous version.

Credit: Austin Mann

The photographer also pushed the iPhone 12 Pro's Night mode to the extreme with a low-light portrait shot of his wife.

"I shot this portrait of Esther about forty-five minutes after sundown, and it was overcast, so there was very little available light. (To give you an idea, we had to use a flashlight to see our path.)" Mann wrote.

Credit: Austin Mann

As you can imagine, there was definitely some camera shake and movement with this unstable setup but thanks to a little Night mode computational wizardry, better OIS, faster ISO, and of course LiDAR, Esther is still sharp and surprisingly color accurate.
The LiDAR worked great here — I realized later I never once messed with the focus it was just locked in on her face the whole time. Also, creating an accurate depth map around the furry hood seems like it would be really complex, but the iPhone 12 Pro did a great job.
The blurring and noise reduction is a bit less realistic and a bit more dreamy? But it's sharp enough where it matters, and overall I found this image to be just lovely. (And so did Esther, which is what matters most!)

Mann also covered some of the other software-based mechanisms introduced with the latest iPhone model, including the new "Truly Locked" Exposure Adjustment that holds a manual exposure setting across shots and lens changes. Mann says the feature allows iPhone to much more closely mimic a manual camera.

Credit: Austin Mann

Although Man took some stunning images with the iPhone 12 Pro, he concluded that serious photographers may be better off waiting for the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

"The iPhone 12 Pro is a solid camera, and thanks to a bunch of new digital tech I found it to be slightly stronger than the already great iPhone 11 Pro — but if you are serious about photography with your iPhone, wait for the iPhone 12 Pro Max. It looks to be the most significant jump in iPhone camera hardware we've experienced in years, and it's only three weeks away," Mann wrote.

The photographer's full review and photo gallery is available here, and is worth a browse for anyone interested in the new iPhone camera.

Follow AppleInsider on Google News

9 Comments

rinosaur

said about 3 years ago

Unfortunate that only the Max got the bigger sensor. I just can’t deal with that size so got the regular Pro. Oh well, got my mirrorless for serious shoots.

ro_ro_ur_boat

said about 3 years ago

I’ve been using my iPhone for my day-to-day photography since iPhone 4. My DLSR (yes, haven’t transitioned to mirrorless) is relegated to sports, events, and portraits photography. Looking forward to the iPhone 12 Pro Max for its cameras.

bageljoey

said about 3 years ago

rinosaur said:

Unfortunate that only the Max got the bigger sensor. I just can’t deal with that size so got the regular Pro. Oh well, got my mirrorless for serious shoots.

I’m so conflicted. I was just getting comfortable with my preorder of the 12Pro. But this article really makes me question that decision! 😭

iOS_Guy80

said about 3 years ago

Looking at the Apple website and comparing the two pro models the max seems to only have a larger screen and a bump in optical zooming over the 12 pro. Any other differences?

normm

said about 3 years ago

iOS_Guy80 said:

Looking at the Apple website and comparing the two pro models the max seems to only have a larger screen and a bump in optical zooming over the 12 pro. Any other differences?

Some significant differences in the cameras. From Gruber's DaringFireball article a few days ago:
WIDE (1×): Same on iPhone 12, 12 Mini, and 12 Pro, with a new ƒ/1.6 lens that captures 27 percent more light than last year’s 1× wide lens. The 12 Pro Max has the same ƒ/1.6 lens, but also has an altogether different sensor that is 47 percent larger than the 1× camera sensor on the other models. This bigger sensor has the same number of pixels (12 MP = 4032 × 3024), but those pixels are bigger. The larger sensor combined with the new-to-all-models ƒ/1.6 lens means the 1× wide camera on the 12 Pro Max captures 87 percent more light than last year’s iPhone 11 models. And that’s not all: in addition to being bigger, the new Pro Max’s 1× camera sensor exclusively features sensor-shift OIS, stabilizing the sensor rather than the lens, which according to Apple is beneficial both for photos and video. This sensor-shift OIS is also what enables the 12 Pro Max’s ability to capture up to 2-second exposures handheld, which, if it works as Apple describes, is a breakthrough that would be impractical in non-computational photography. Bottom line: all iPhone 12 models have the same 1× camera lens, which is faster than last year’s models, but the 12 Pro Max also has a bigger sensor and sensor-shift OIS.
TELEPHOTO: This is the lens that the non-Pro models do not have. On the iPhone 12 Pro, it’s a 2× ƒ/2.0 lens with equivalent field of view to a 52mm lens. On the 12 Pro Max, it’s a 2.5× ƒ/2.2 lens equivalent to a 65mm lens. The sensors, apparently, are the same or effectively the same. 2.5× is “better” than 2.0× because it’s longer, offering more effective optical zoom. But ƒ/2.0 is “better” than ƒ/2.2, because it lets in more light. But whatever low-light advantage the 12 Pro’s ƒ/2.0 aperture might have over the 12 Pro Max’s ƒ/2.2 aperture, in practice this is almost certainly effectively moot, because in low-light situations the camera system probably gets better results using the faster 1× camera and digitally zooming to a 2×/2.5× crop factor.

Latest comparisons