Inspired by Lux cameras’s excellent iPhone 16 review, I decided to put together a review of my experience taking street photographs with the new iPhone 16 Pro with camera control.
The Goal
I taken a lot of street photographs over the years, mostly with a Fuji X100, X-Pro1 or a Ricoh GR. The focal length I’m most comfortable with with 35mm (full frame equivalent). The 28mm on the GR is great, but sometimes I find it a bit too wide and I always find myself gravitating back to the Fujis.
A few days ago I was looking through some old photos and found a set of street photographs I had taken in Lahore with an iPhone X with the Halide app. I remember that day well, I went out to take photos only to find out that I had left my cameras battery in the charger. I couldn’t go back, so I started taking photos with my iPhone and shot RAW using Halide. 6 years later, the editing flexibility of those RAW files is incredible. Even now looking at those photos, its amazing to think I took then with a phone.
So I thought to myself, what if I treated the iPhone 16 Pro as a proper street photography cameras and shot with it the way I use my Fuji or Ricoh. Could the iPhone keep up?
Fuji X100VI, iPhone 16 Pro, Ricoh GR II
The Setup
From a size standpoint, the iPhone is definitely the thinner of the bunch, but the Ricoh is definitely easier hold one handed than the iPhone, mainly due to its ergonomics as a dedicated camera. Having a 3rd party thumb grip also helps. The Ricoh naturally fits into the my hand with my index finger landing on the shutter button and my thumb on the attached thumb rest. With the iPhone I had to use my pinky to support the phone and I always found myself feeling around for the camera control since its flush with the body.
I also figured it would be a good opportunity to test out camera control and see if it has any real world utility.
I opted to use Halide mainly because of the ability to set focus manually. When I’m shooting with my Fuji or Ricoh I tend to manually set focus at a higher aperture (f8 and be there!). Plus I found that with the native camera app it was very easy to accidentally swipe on camera control which can lead to unintentionally changing settings like exposure.
The one thing I noticed almost immediately is that the native camera app is just more snappier and responsive. The native camera app also has a visual cue to let the user know a photo has been taken (the screen turns black for a split second mimicking a camera shutter), where Halide has haptics to let you know a photo has been taken. The one thing I really liked about Halide was the ability of focus peak and being able to lock camera control to avoid accidental swipes (something that happens quite often with the native camera app).
Halide makes it easy to manual focus with focus peaking
The Results
Focus peaking is great, I was easily able to see what areas of the frame would be in focus. It was great for shots where I would wait for someone to walk into the frame.
The 5x lens was also great. I found it good for much more tighter frames with maybe one or two people in frame at the most. I did find myself “zooming with my feet” a lot more when using the 5x lens. It was wonderful for the types photos that I normally regularly taken using iPhones, composing a frame and waiting for someone to walk through.
However I wanted to see if I could walk at a brisk pace taking photos as I see them using camera control and manual focus, employing the same approach I do when shooting with my Ricoh.
One thing I was pleasantly surprised was that when my focus distance was a bit closer, I was able to get some natural shallow depth of field, no portrait mode or computational gobbledygook needed.
A limitation which I found myself challenged by was the shutter lag when shooting RAW and the lack of a burst mode when using camera control. When shooting with my Ricoh I sometimes shoot at 3fps or 5fps, with the native camera app keeping the camera control button pressed triggers video recording and with Halide it does nothing.
Another strange limitation of camera control on the native camera app I noticed was that a photo is only taken the button is released, not when it’s pressed. I missed quite a few shots because of and had to remind myself to press and release the button when I wanted to take a photo. Halide did not behave like this, a photo was taken as soon as the button is pressed.
Overall I’m very happy with the results. It’s incredible how far iPhone cameras have come. The camera control button is getting a lot of flak but I think it has potential. Its not perfect, but there nothing that can’t be fixed or updated via a future iOS update.A lot of folks keep wishing for Apple to release a dedicated camera, they already make one and it can hold it own when compared to a dedicated street photography camera.