Monday, February 20, 2023

Bird Watching with a Cell-phone? Samsung S23 Ultra is like having a telephoto lens in your pocket. + FOY Am. Woodcock

Bird Watching with a Cell-phone? Samsung S23 Ultra is like having a telephoto lens in your pocket. + FOY Am. Woodcock



This weekend, I had picked up a new phone - its a Samsung S23 Ultra. Its a Samsung "flagship" phone - which I have never really owned --- I had the mid-range Samsung A series phones.  The reason I chose this phone is because I heard the cameras that its sports are pretty amazing.   Of course, an SLR camera can be lugged around, and if you have several thousand dollars, you can buy a wide angle lens, regular zoom and telephoto lenses. 



It is capable of wide-angle shots to capture a nice landscape scene, a regular zoom with an ultra fast F1.8 aperture to have nice bokeh behind the subjects you are photographing, and a periscope style 30x optical zoom with up to a 100x "superzoom" for still photos.  In video, I think you are limited to 20 or 30x zooming. 




So after Church on Sunday morning , I pointed my cell phone up at the top of the bridge to see how good the zoom was,,, and I noticed a peregrine falcon sitting up there. I was about 400m from the bridge, plus the height of the towers might be 100m up --- so this raptor might have been 0.5km from me! 








This video shows the wide angle to 30x zoom.  It does not go higher than 30x for video.


See another demo here ... (cant embed!)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OTxKF1v75Pc

This cell phone also has some pretty amazing technology --- which includes astrophotography. Incredibly, it can do long exposure sky scenes without the use of a mechanical skytracker. It uses software to to counter act the star trailing effect from the rotation of the earth. So, you could take a 10 minute exposure of the milky way, with out any blur effect ... I can't wait to try this out!


So, can a cell phone replace a heavy DSLR camera with 20lbs worth of lenses?  Time will tell but I must say that its impressed me and my son so far just for its quality of photography and videography.





One last closing thought - I had an American Woodcock Peenting and Timberdoodling in South Cameron Woodlot --- My first of year on Feb 19th 2023 at about 6:45pm. This might be the earliest that I have seen one!

Good Birding

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