Just a few pictures from my walk around the block with the dogs this morning; I’m very happy with my decision to get the new phone/camera 🙂

After my adventures with a couple of compact cameras, and seeing a very good discount offer (we use Google Fi as our phone carrier) I decided to use some of the money I had saved for an EDC camera to buy a new phone instead.

It is the new (ish) Pixel 9 Pro, which, as well as being a fabulous, flagship phone, has a triple camera set up (ultrawide, normal, telephoto)…

… that gives you manual controls and lets you download the RAW files, so you get all the sensor info so you can play around with them in Lightroom …

Surprisingly it lets you get some bokeh (though it is a little harsh), but these are not bad at all, and it lets you switch to saving as 12MP for normal, everyday use so you don’t use up all your storage, and takes nice panoramas too- it is also IP68 dust and weather-sealed!

I shall miss the folding convenience of my Z Flip 5, but I suspect it will go to another family member 😉 And while this is in no way as good as a proper camera, it is about as good as a phone camera gets- you can either let Google process the pics with their excellent algorithms, or do it your self with the RAW files- and this will be with me at all times.

It will be fun to see what I can get out of it as I get more used to it- and of course I will still take a real camera and glass when I want to go on a “photo walk”.

So, I’ve spent a little more time with the RX100 this weekend, and I like it better than I did.

Sunday at church was a little too busy to do too much with it, but I did grab a couple of shots in the church to see what it was like. It has a very nice reach (200mm equivalent), but even with our new church lighting it’s still kinda noisy:

But as you can see above, with some AI magic from Lightroom it’s quite a usable shot.

And this shot from the same spot (not cropped in) shows how nice it is to have the reach (and the image stabilization)!

And this lunchtime it was finally a little brighter out, so I took it to the woods to take a few shots of the emerging flora:

It is very nice to have a proper lens that opens up to a decent (f/2.8) aperture to get some nice shallow depth of field so that you can isolate your subject a bit- you can’t really do that with a phone camera unless you fake it (though I do hear the camera on the Pixel 9 Pro can do it for real).

I have it for another couple of days, so we’ll see if it grows on me any more (though I still think the lack of weather/dust sealing is a dealbreaker)- it’s a shame you can’t rent cell phones for a week or so to try them out before you have to drop all that money on them!