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Comment by MarkusWandel | Hacker News Reader

Phone cameras are really good in daylight and getting better in low light, but there's one thing they'll never have and that's a decent flash. It doesn't matter whether Xenon flashtube or LED, to get real flash you need a real flash capacitor, and that's just not a priority in a slim smartphone.

Bonus if your old-school digicam also has a front element over half an inch in diameter and zooms to 10x. That still gives a satisfying "real camera" feel. I have a Panasonic ZS3 that I still use quite a bit for vacation snaps, and one of these days I hope to (inexpensively) snap up a Canon G series.

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This is the main reason I bring a film point-and-shoot to parties and social events: people look way better with a “real” flash than they do with a phone flash. That and the dynamic range of film are still unsurpassed by just about anything in phone form.

As a (very) amateur photographer, this doesn’t make sense to me. Flashes indoors always look terrible in my experience, and modern smartphones are great in low light.

Modern smartphones perform very admirably in low light, but with some undesirable (IMO) tradeoffs: you get all kinds of weird artifacts from extrapolation, and the overall image frequently looks muddy compared to a low-light capture on a DSLR or mirrorless camera (which tend to look noisy instead). I do, however, regularly make those tradeoffs when I don't want to bug people with a flash or haul a full camera body to a show, though!

I think my use of flash indoors amounts to an aesthetic preference: I like the way skin tones come out on the combination of a ludicrous P&S flash and a "cheap" color stock like Gold 200. The tradeoff is glare and red-eye, both of which can be compensated for during compensation or with editing after the fact.

You can get very good results by turning the flash power down a few notches and pointing it at the ceiling.

For built-flashes that can’t be aimed I usually hold a white sheet of paper just in front of it.

The flash of P&S Film cameras have their own look that people like and are often associated with a "party aesthetic."

If the ceilings are white and not too high, aim the flash to bounce off of the ceiling; that looks way better.

That's mostly to do with the direction of the light from the flash and how bright it.

For example if you can make use of a bounce flash you can get a lovely soft fill light.

Light coming from very close to the axis of the lens as the dominant light source is going to make your scene look very flat.

It works well for a day light fill a few stops down but generally looks a bit crap as the only light.

Using flash on color negative film is a very different experience from digital. Xenon flashes do really well with film, and don't blow out highlights like digital, giving a smooth rolloff that's very pleasing to the eye.

> modern smartphones are great in low light.

This is only true if you only view images on a smartphone. Blow them up on a 23 inch or larger monitor and you'll notice tons of digital NR, artifacting, and other fuckery where the image processing algorithms have tried to recover detail and not really done so all that well.

That's an interesting thought about flash.

Of course you could do something like turn your phone's flash down to the lowest setting, put a filter over it and use it to trigger an off camera flash. Something like an old Nikon SB-800 in SU-4 mode.

You could even hold the SB-800 in one hand and the phone in the other, sort of Bruce Gilden style. (dear gods what am I suggesting...)

Personally I love an X100 and its leaf shutter. My fav old digital camera.

More importantly: a cell phone's flash can never be significantly off-axis or diffuse. Flat and/or hard lighting is often worse than no lighting.

I bet you could get an off-camera flash to trigger off a cell phone's flash though.

Couldn’t you rig up a mirror to point the flash at the ceiling?

Seems simpler to buy a slave flash that's triggered by the burst of light.

I did a bit of googling and it seems it's a bit more complex than I realized (sync issues), but can be done.

handheld flash for phone:

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Certified-Generation-Flashlight...

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