On one of my rarer and rarer photo prowls around the house (I’m quite busy at work these days), I found a bagworm moth (family Psychidae) that seems to have had trouble getting out of its cocoon. This made it a perfect captive but “live” subject. So I decided to make an unfair comparison between the camera on my iPhone (last year’s model, the 4s) and the macro lens on my Nikon D70 (a 9-year-old model, now!).
Each camera had a special lens attached to it: the iPhone had my recently acquired Olloclip, a handy little 3-in-1 attachment that just pinches the top corner of the phone and lets you choose between wide-angle, fisheye, and macro lenses:
The D70 had the Tokina 100mm macro lens, renowned for its sharpness, but quite a bit bigger:
You can see the results below:
The iPhone/Olloclip combo, despite its lack of fine controls, really didn’t fare all that badly, particularly considering that it’s much more likely to be at hand than the Nikon in casual situations. Cropped and adjusted versions make the iPhone photo even less terrible:
Sure, the Nikon’s depth of field and better lighting (I used their small flash unit, the SB400) make it a much better photo, but neither one’s going to be a prize-winner, and the iPhone’s is certainly acceptable.
I plan to upgrade my Nikon to a more recent model soon; I have no plans to upgrade the iPhone.