I replaced my full frame camera with a phone

Using the Honor 200 as my walk-about camera while leaving my full-frame on the shelf

On my return trip to the UK this summer I brought back with me my usual collection of cameras. This included my walk-about Sony A7C. However, I also brought back my Honor 200 phone and for the last three months my Sony sat collecting dust as I used my phone exclusively for all photography. The question is, how did it compare?

Macro mode of the Honor 200 — Using the macro function on the shipped camera app, photo straight out the camera

Software and apps

The Honor 200 comes with an excellent camera app, containing a number of lens profiles I used frequently. These include Aperture, for shallow depth of field, Night and Macro. The AI Portrait mode was the most promoted feature at the phone’s launch, a tie-in with Studio Harcourt, but not something I was particularly excited by.

The shipped camera app also allows raw capture, but it’s a separate setting so it is not possible to shoot in raw and macro, for example. The question, then, is how well do the in-camera JPGs turn out?

Night shot of the Northen Lights down the river Thames — Northern Lights over the Thames, shot using the Night mode

I also treated myself to ProShot, a paid-for camera app that allows raw shooting with many manual controls. It is very good and I used this when I knew I wanted to do extensive post-processing in raw.

Editing

When it comes to photos taken on the phone, I tend to use the Android Lightroom app. Since I have a subscription, I have access to all the features and my library is shared across devices.

shooting into the light — Masking, vignetting, removal of chromatic aberration and a crop

This post contains photos edited in a number of different ways. Some are SOOC (straight out the camera jpgs with no editing), others have had simple masks applied.

Generative Fill

Also, I had fun with some generative fills, removing objects like cars from landscape shots. This is not something I do with my regular photography. I have quite a strict philosophy when it comes to using ‘cheats’ on work posted publicly. I’ll allow myself to straighten the horizon, make basic tone edits, and perhaps use a simple mask, but I rarely crop images, let alone remove objects altogether.

old world look — Generative fill was used to remove ‘modern’ distractions like sign-posts and TV aerials (incomplete edit)

Since these images were all shot for fun, however, I allowed myself the luxury of tinkering a bit more than usual while editing on the phone in a cafe with a coffee. I’ll try and break these down under each image.

Natural Look

One of the reasons for using this phone exclusively this summer, and indeed one of the reasons I bought it in the first place, is its rendering of natural colours, tones and sharpness. We are all aware of ‘digital sharpness’, that ghastly effect normally associated with action cams and pretty much every camera phone manufactured up until recently. Only in the last year have phone manufacturers started to address this over-sharpening issue.

This photo, taken on an overcast day and SOOC without any editing, is a good example of natural skin tones and natural sharpness. Indeed, there is little need for editing when it comes to selfies and portraits. When I think about it, I consciously avoided taking this kind of shot with my previous phones, but now it’s comforting to know that I can take family photos that I can look back on without getting irritated by over-sharpening or orange coloured skin.

Macro

The usual rules of macro photography apply here. A steady hand and a focus on the point of interest. I attempted so many macro shots in the field with few satisfactory results, mainly because my subjects were moving in the wind. This is normal for macro photography.

macro of bumble bee — This is a jpg with some minor adjustments. This wasn’t shot in macro mode but the phone did a good job of isolating the subject from the background

Where the phone excelled, however, was when I had complete control over the shooting environment and the macro feature on the Honor 200 produced some excellent results.

0.6 x magnification in Super Macro mode — SOOC macro at 0.6, 1 and 2x maganification

1x magnification in Super Macro mode — SOOC macro at 0.6, 1 and 2x maganification

Landscape

sizewell beach — Lifting the shadows for a more painterly effect

Using ProShot to take raw landscape, the three preset focal lengths are 16, 24 and 69mm (35mm equivalent).

For me, camera phones are well-placed for landscape photography. With a 24mm equivalent and good rendering in daylight, the slow-moving nature of landscape photography means you have time to play with buttons on a phone that may be less intuitive than a mirrorless or dslr.

rspb lakenheath — This is a SOOC jpg, taken early morning around sunrise

SOOC jpg (left) vs basic raw edit (right)

I thought I’d let my creative juices run wild on this next example. Shooting straight into the sunset I lifted the shadows before applying a light denoise to help with the darker areas, before overlaying a global filter. I’ve then cropped in to show the detail in the centre of the image. The original crop was 1,600px wide but it was exported at 25% quality

sunset at downham market — Raw edit with denoise and a filter

a crop of the sunset shot — A crop taken from the image above showing acceptable detail in the middle of the image, ignoring compression for internet upload

I’d say around 80% of the photographs I took this summer were landscape, which is pretty high for me. I think that says a lot about the convenience of a half-decent camera on a phone, which I may use for convenience on shots that I otherwise just wouldn’t have taken.

Low Light

I used two different camera settings for my low light photography this summer. The built-in camera app has a low-light mode, which requires the user to hold the camera in place for a few seconds, where I presume it takes a few photos, amalgamates them and then churns out an AI interpretation of the scene. The shot of the Northern Lights, above, was taken in this mode. It fares quite well in reasonably lit scenes but I noticed it struggled to keep stars in focus. This is not a bad solution for general snaps.

I preferred to take my low light shots using ProShot, opting for a slow shutter speed and captured in raw. The noise levels increase but it’s not anything Lightroom can’t sort out in post.

low light shot with Honor 200 phone — This shot is quite heavily edited, with five mask areas and denoising, but I was able to pull out the reflection in the water that I couldn’t see at the time of shooting

another low light shot with the honor 200

In some instances I preferred the SOOC jpgs, like the following photograph taken in a coffee shop in Downham Market. Clicking Lightroom’s ‘auto’ button on the raw version lightened the shadows to reveal more detail and a lighter exposure all round, but this is the shot I saw so I stuck with the phone’s jpg version. Again, the background has a slight blur while retaining enough sharpness to discern the various objects on the shelves. I suspect the phone decided on a shallow depth of field, with the true focus point on the letter ‘S’.

Street Photography

I think this is the genre I struggled with the most. Not only do I have a particular style of street photography, but also a particular technique. The most obvious one is putting the camera to my eye, which you can’t do with a phone… obviously.

Of course, this style of street photography may not be as accessible in the UK as it is in SE Asia. As a tourist you can get away with a lot more than you can in the west, like being less likely to offend. Fortunately dogs don’t take it personally.

street photography in berkhampsted — Gotta get used to these overcast days here in the UK. The tropics this is not!

When shooting street I tend to shoot at anything between 1/250 and 1/500, so at least with ProShot you have that level of control. I found when shooting with the phone’s native camera app on overcast days it would drop the shutter speed down to 1/60. Using the native app, I tended to just stick to ‘photo’ mode. Unfortunately there is no ‘sports’ mode, although the ‘pro’ mode gives you the same level of control as the ProShot app, and will output in raw too.

Of course, the old adage ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’ applies here, and often I found myself in situations where I wouldn’t have had my mirrorless on me, but had the phone. The upshot is that I found myself taking subjects I might otherwise have ignored. This isn’t specific to this phone, of course, but once I had accepted I wouldn’t be shooting street with my Sony, I felt a bit more inclined to have my phone at the ready when walking through towns.

street photography of subjects I wouldn't normally shoot — Nothing special about the subject here but I liked the lines. I was with other people and wasn’t able to hang around for long!

Final Thoughts

Shooting exclusively with a phone for months on end was a complete revelation to me. It’s not something I’d done too much previously because I tend to buy budget phones with sub-par cameras. The over-sharpened, digital look is something I actively avoid in both my stills and my video, which is why it’s great that phone manufacturers are now addressing the issue with more natural-looking results.

In some scenarios, like low light or shallow depth of field, the camera is using AI and it doesn’t always work. There is an ‘aperture’ mode on the native Honor 200 app, which forces a shallow depth of field. This can work quite well, especially on product shots or still life, but I found that shallow depth of field on selfies and portraits to be distracting and quite unrealistic. I prefered shooting in ‘photo’ mode when taking shots of people when using the native app. It still blurs the background but doesn’t apply anything too heavy.

As for street, this is as much a change in my methodology as anything. Old habits die hard and I find it awkward shooting quick shots by holding a phone out in front of me. It’s an area I will continue to experiment with but making sure I’m shooting with a fast shutter speed isn’t as intuitive as turning a dial on a camera.

It was the landscape shots that I was most impressed with. In good light, the camera is capturing some great detail, with enough latitude in raw for some extensive editing.