Battle of the Cameras: My iPhone Yielded the Pot of Gold

Ever found a rainbow’s elusive pot of gold?

My Canon DSLR just couldn’t do it. It just couldn’t give me the pot of gold that my iPhone did, with this panorama of a sudden rainbow emerging off my back deck. To get to that pot of gold, I tried both my Canon Rebel XSi and my iPhone cameras, but it was my iPhone 5s that trumped with its HDR Panorama feature.

To truly bring out the intensity and spectacular perfection of the rainbow’s spectrum, I relied on Adobe Lightroom on my big iMac color-adjusted monitor. While I’m a fan of iPad photo editing apps (especially Snapseed and Photo FX) for my iPhone shots, I didn’t trust the iPad Mini’s small retina screen to allow the detail the image could yield, as you can see in this crop (below) from the same pano photo, Pot of Gold (shown uncropped above).

Perhaps it’s an unfair comparison, because that wily rainbow was fading away by the time I had my Canon DSLR ready to shoot, but despite many brave efforts made later in Lightroom, the Canon DSLR rainbow wouldn’t give up much of its charms:

A few caveats: If printing were a consideration, I’d have to make my photograph with my Canon DSLR, no question. The resolution required to print a crisp, clean image just isn’t there (yet) in our iPhones. And the beauty we see from a small but glowing back-lit display makes it hard for prints on mere paper to compete with iPhotos. But—not bad for a humble iPhone photo, is it? ♣

Take at look at more of my photographs made courtesy of Mother Nature’s largesse at my Naturescapes Shop.

Let’s continue the dialogue these photographs began: Which camera do you think wins out in the Battle of the Cameras?

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