Shuzenji Christmas

February 16, 2019

Remembering a few months ago when we spent a snow-less Christmas in the small ryokan town of Shuzenji, Shizuoka.

The only cameras we brought on this trip were the Leica Q and the iPhone X - in the end of course the Leica provided better overall quality, but it was amazing to see how much more immediately useful the iPhone photos were the instant they were captured.

The strengths of computational photography were most readily apparent when looking at the metering of the sky against the foreground/cityscapes - while the Leica required the typical “expose for highlights and leave everything else in dark shadows to be recovered in post” - the iPhone just simply got everything right from the start.

As a result, there’s still several gigabytes worth of DNGs sitting in Lightroom from this trip, unprocessed, whilst the vast majority of the photos in this entry - and shared from the trip in general - are the ones from the iPhone.

We’ve been late to appreciate certain technological advances in the past (for example, we didn’t switch from garakei to smartphones until the iPhone 4, and only in the last two years did we come to love the many advantages of the tiny Micro 4/3rds format - just as its era is drawing to a close) - but it seems unlikely we will repeat that error when it comes to computational photography…