Device for taking decent landscape photos

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Fred99

13684 posts

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#2173381 5-Feb-2019 12:18

nickb800:

I like to go hiking/mountain biking to cool places and taking photos. Especially landscape shots from the top of big hills. These photos usually end up on my TV (Google Chromecast), as desktop images on my computer and such. Photographically they are nothing special, but they keep me going between holidays. I currently use my phone (Nexus 5X) which on the face of it is great - 12 megapixels - but the photos lack detail and just don't 'pop'. If I look closer, the detail looks a bit fuzzy. Phone is on full resolution settings - so nothing I can do there.

Here's an example - the beech tree on the left looks fuzzy when you look closely

'

I don't think that "technically" there's too much wrong with that.

Light is very important in landscape photos, and in that case the lighting is dull / cloudy.

There's a "pop" slider in the photo edit menu in the standard camera app in the Nexus 5x. It works. By default, saturation / contrast etc is neutral in the 5x. I don't see exif data in the image, so can't really be sure, there's possibly some detail loss through noise reduction going on. The rest of the image looks pretty sharp.

I have a 5x. The cameras in these are okay - they were quite good by 3 years ago standards. My wife has a Note 9, the camera is very noticeably much better than the 5x. My son has a pixel 2, also much better than the 5x.

IMO, my 5x is now rather outdated and due for replacement, if I were you I'd probably not buy a pocketable camera, but aim to replace the 5x which you'll probably need to do sometime in the not too distant future with something with a more premium camera. The rumoured "lite" pixels might be okay at a more reasonable price than premium models. There are also a few phones with wide angle lens/camera options, Huawei etc, at around the $1k mark with superb cameras.

nickb800

2715 posts

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#2173788 6-Feb-2019 07:33

Fred99:

nickb800:

I like to go hiking/mountain biking to cool places and taking photos. Especially landscape shots from the top of big hills. These photos usually end up on my TV (Google Chromecast), as desktop images on my computer and such. Photographically they are nothing special, but they keep me going between holidays. I currently use my phone (Nexus 5X) which on the face of it is great - 12 megapixels - but the photos lack detail and just don't 'pop'. If I look closer, the detail looks a bit fuzzy. Phone is on full resolution settings - so nothing I can do there.

Here's an example - the beech tree on the left looks fuzzy when you look closely

'

I don't think that "technically" there's too much wrong with that.

Light is very important in landscape photos, and in that case the lighting is dull / cloudy.

There's a "pop" slider in the photo edit menu in the standard camera app in the Nexus 5x. It works. By default, saturation / contrast etc is neutral in the 5x. I don't see exif data in the image, so can't really be sure, there's possibly some detail loss through noise reduction going on. The rest of the image looks pretty sharp.

I have a 5x. The cameras in these are okay - they were quite good by 3 years ago standards. My wife has a Note 9, the camera is very noticeably much better than the 5x. My son has a pixel 2, also much better than the 5x.

IMO, my 5x is now rather outdated and due for replacement, if I were you I'd probably not buy a pocketable camera, but aim to replace the 5x which you'll probably need to do sometime in the not too distant future with something with a more premium camera. The rumoured "lite" pixels might be okay at a more reasonable price than premium models. There are also a few phones with wide angle lens/camera options, Huawei etc, at around the $1k mark with superb cameras.

Fair point about the lighting.

Yeah the Nexus 5X is getting old, so hard to find an equivalent replacement for it though, they were such good value for a flagship phone. I'm onto my second 5X after killing the first one with water after 18 months. Realistically I won't be able to afford another flagship, but those Pixel lites could be a goer.

In the meantime I've picked up an old Lumix ultrazoom, which does a bit better than the 5X - photos are passable for my desktop

Gurezaemon

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#2205498 27-Mar-2019 09:23

nickb800:

Gurezaemon:

A totally different take on this would be to use a regular (cheap) digicam, and stitch together photos using something like Microsoft ICE, that is very easy to use and generally gives good results.

It can be similar to Google's Photo Sphere functionality, but it lets you create panoramas while utilizing the full resolution of the camera.

That's cool, thanks. I'd love to take panoramas that can stretch across dual 1920x1080 monitors but found the inbuilt panorama function to be too low res. Will take heaps of photos next time and give ICE a go

Just to add to this - while I find the idea of panoramas very cool, they tend to look pretty uninspiring on the screen unless the photo is composed well, and has some sense of depth. A 180° image of a range of mountains on its own will just make it look like a lot of small mountains very far away. Having something up (very) close to provide depth works wonders, but this can pose problems if taking multiple photos with the intention of stitching them together.

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