I went on holiday without my Canon

I’ve been a photographer for years. I’m not a professional or specially brilliant but I know enough about camera settings to be able to take some pretty good shots. Yeah, you can take pictures with a phone camera but they’re not in the race, especially for things like birds. Digital zoom is basically useless unless you’re into impressionism.

But then I was given a Samsung S24 - ultra. It has an array of lenses and boasts up to 10 times optical zoom.

We were going on a 1 week trip to Norfolk Island, a place we’d visited twice before, so I thought, “what the hey - I’ll leave the Canon at home”.

One thing that’s true of all phone cameras - they handle light conditions very well so they’re perfect for casual shots of people at parties and the like. They do pretty well with movement, too, and you can use the professional settings, stipulating ISO, focal length and the like if you’re not happy with the defaults. But what I was really interested in was close ups.

I took some flower pictures. Here’s one of a hibiscus flower.

and here’s the same photo cropped.

The resolution is wonderful.

I noticed a butterfly flittering around a daisy and took a few shots.

Here’s the same butterfly at 10x zoom cropped.

That’s pretty damned good if you ask me.

Also, Samsung now enables images to be saved in RAW format which gives much greater editing control than a jpg.

I won’t be giving up my Canon and its 300x zoom anytime soon for taking pictures of birds and the like. But I might be happy to use the phone’s camera for most of my holiday snaps.

And just to illustrate the difference, these two were taken with the Canon, the first at a zoo, the second at the beach.