After being laughed at for taking the new iPhone 11 Pro Max seriously as a camera I can use, along with all of the more accepted cameras we all know and love, I have persevered and with great interest. For one, the iPhone is light enough to slip into my pocket, which I do. That’s enough for starters, but of course I gravitate toward doing the kind of camera work I always have done and that involves some accessories, so let’s start there.
As mentioned, I am involved with vetting the gear I find useful for using the Apple iPhone 11 Pro with its three onboard cameras. Of course, I can (and do) carry around the iPhone and take photos. However, my own jitteriness makes it too unstable for excellent still-life shots. LOL.
Next, I mistakenly assumed that a monopod would help to stabilize the camera-work I like to do. However, the good monopods are still heavy to carry around, so I searched around to find the lightest carbon-fiber monopod as I could. I found one that is under one pound, about ¾ of a pound.
However, when I tried about five different monopods that I have (heavy or not), what I find is that monopods, although they help, still are prone to wiggle and shakiness, more than I can allow, so I was back to square one.
My next step was to look for small, lightweight tripods that could fill the bill. I looked at everything from those ultra-thin tube-tripods that have elastic cord inside them so that you kind of shake out the legs, and then very small tripods, those with just very narrow tubes, and on and on.
What I found out from all of that is that these very thin tube tripods themselves are not really that steady and have problems of the their own. This led me to looking at tripods in the range of strength I am more used to, and I already have a bunch. But of course I had to buy one more. LOL.
However, if they are 3-4 lbs., even that is a lot to haul around for use with a smart phone. And so, to bite the bullet, I have found a small Gitzo carbon-fiber tripod that weighs a little over two pounds. That seems doable, and I tried it out during a typical outing.
The small tripod, which weighs 2.5 lbs., is the Gitzo GT-1545-T (Traveler). And I have a ball-head from another small tripod, the AOKA KB-20, which has an Arca-Swiss clamp. All told, that weight is very manageable. In addition, I have a very tiny video head that allows me to move the iPhone smoothly. I also have a DJI 3-gimbal hand-held device (DJI Osmo Mobile 3) that I can use for video (or stills), but the tripod is my first choice.
As for tripod heads for the iPhones themselves, the story is similar. There are a lot of little tripod mounts for iPhone out there, often very inexpensive. However, they seem to be made out of cheap plastic and, worse, are cobbled together so that parts are “clunky” and the haptics of them are, well, terrible. I hate to be stuck using such junk, even if it is inexpensive.
And many of these cheap tripod heads have spring-loaded clamps for the iPhone. Sounds like a nice thing thought I yet having to pry open and then close the clamps when doing or holding other things, became a pain after using them for a time or two. It is not surprising that after a short while, I yearned for a simple clamp that we tighten with a knob like I am used to.
I now have an expensive head for iPhones from Really Right Stuff. It is totally well-made as most RRS products are. I seem to never learn. Buy good equipment right off and stop trying to save a buck. Now I have a good RRS head and a handful of ones that are not good, but still cost me money. They sit on the shelf.
RAW IMAGES
Moving on to raw images with the iPhone 11 Pro Max, they are available. However, you have to (at this point) use one of several apps. And while Adobe LR Mobile is said to be the best, at this point Adobe LR does not support all three cameras in the iPhone 11 Pro. However, ProCamera, an app for the iPhone that costs about $8 does support them and can store them as TIF files or DNG.
I find ProCamera very useful and easy to use. And most of all, I find raw images absolutely wonderful to have on the iPhone 11 Pro Max.
EXPORTING VIDEO AND STILLs
I did have a lot of trouble getting large videos (like 11 GB) off my new iPhone and it took almost three days for me to sort it out. I tried to export to DropBox, but that did not work for large files. Finally, I had to use iCloud. I exported to iCloud and then downloaded these large files to my computer, after which I could place them on DropBox or wherever I wanted.
All of the above begs the question of what the final image quality will look like. Now, that I have sorted out most of the accessories and process, I am ready to dig into that. It is important to know that the low ISO on the iPhone 11 Pro Max is something like 21 ISO and a higher ISO range of 3072 ISO (wide-angle lens), which is much lower than any other camera I own. The front-facing lens is 24mm and f/2.2.
The image output size is 4032 x 3024, with cameras apertures of f/2.4 for the 13mm super-wide-angle lens, f/2/8 for the wide-angle lens, and f/2.0 for the 51mm telephoto.
Perhaps there are others serious users of the iPhone 11 Pro Max out there and we can discuss this very interesting (to me) portable camera!
