The camera in my new iPhone 6 Plus kicks ass!

Posted on September 29, 2014

SHOT WITH IPHONE 6 PLUS: Instagram portrait of JV high school football player from Monte Vista high school after they lost to Liberty in Alamo, California on September 19, 2014. (Photo by Brad Mangin)

 

It is no secret that for the past three baseball seasons I have been filling up my Instagram feed with iPhone pictures of baseball players and my cats Mike and Willie. My journey as an iPhone photographer got going full blast when I brought my iPhone 4S to spring training in Arizona in 2012. I was so jacked up when I got back I wrote a story about how much I loved my new camera. Before long I was hounding my picture editor at Sports Illustrated, Nate Gordon, to get my baseball iPhone Instagrams published in the magazine. My dream came true in July of 2012 when SI published 18 of my Instagrams (all shot with my iPhone 4S) splashed across the six pages of Leading Off in the front of the magazine.

Over the past two years I have continuously upgraded my phone and have been loving my iPhone 5S. How much better could an iPhone get?  I found out a few weeks ago when I attended the big Apple event in Cupertino on September 9, 2014. It was on this day that Apple unveiled details of the new iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. Holy cow was the screen on the 6 Plus ever big! The camera in the phones was supposed to be improved, and the combination of a better camera with that ginormous screen meant one thing- I had to have an iPhone 6 Plus!

I got my hands on the new iPhone 6 Plus on Friday morning, September 19th at the Apple Store in the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California. The store itself was an amazing venue to shoot in, with a crazy glass ceiling that let amazing rays of sunlight splash down on the customers and products below. The scene was screaming to be photographed, so I went to work. I shot my first few frames inside the store, with my favorite picture appearing above. The file looked amazing and being able to edit on the huge screen was a joy. Within minutes I was hooked!

Over the next few days I shot pictures with my iPhone 6 Plus at a high school football game and Major League Baseball games in Oakland and San Francisco. I also photographed my cats Mike and Willie. I won’t get super technical here talking about megapixels and stuff like that. I am a photographer, not a scientist. I really don’t care about all of that crap. All I care about are the end results, and my recent iPhone pictures are looking really good lately!

Apple says they improved the autofocus in the iPhone 6 and I believe them. That is probably the one function I was a little disappointed with in older iPhones. Sometimes my pictures just weren’t sharp. Now they are!

Over the next month I will be shooting some post season baseball games, including the World Series. I cannot wait to bring along my iPhone 6 Plus and see what I can get with my new toy. I still get the biggest kick out of making a good image with the phone and then immediately sharing the picture over the Instagram network. We all love to share our work, and if I am going to share my pictures they better look good. Thanks to the new iPhone 6 Plus my Instagrams look better than ever- and my phone isn’t even bent!