Can you select aperture with your iPhone (without special apps)?
On my Motorola Android, I can switch to manual mode for shutter speed, etc., but aperture is always wide open.
This is an interesting point.
Apple provides the standard Camera app which is intended to do most of everything automatically for the 90 percentile user. Like the Polaroid SX-70, the control is basically a lighten/darken slider. And then there are dozens of more sophisticated camera apps from third party providers that allow excruciatingly fine control of every adjustable camera parameter. But an explicit aperture setting is not one of them.
Many of the tiny cameras in these devices do not have an adjustable aperture in the lens at all, much like a Minox 8x11 submini does not have an adjustable aperture. The notion is that the lens is optimized for wide open setting and the DoF is so great because of the tiny sensor format that they don't need an adjustable aperture. The exposure is balanced by adjusting sensitivity against exposure time, not by adjusting the size of the lens opening. Also, stopping down the lens on these teensy focal lengths would likely be an immediate drop into diffraction-size lens openings and poorer quality imaging.
The iPhone 11 Pro has three cameras with 1.54mm f/2.4, 4.25mm f/1.8, and 6mm f/2 lenses respectively. I doubt you could stop any of them down by more than a stop, if that, and not get diffraction problems immediately. They're all three right on the edge of diffraction limits wide open.
🙂
The Light L16 camera, which has sixteen small cameras partitioned into 3 groups of effectively 28mm f/2, 75mm f/2, and 150mm f/2.4 equivalent focal lengths (I don't have the actual focal lengths near to hand) also basically operates with all camera lenses wide open to promote the best capture capable. All "stopped down" settings are simulations/computationally provided adjustments based upon modeling of the lens and sensor characteristics. 10 of the 16 cameras are used for every exposure at all focal length equivalents from 28mm to 150mm, and the integrated result in each exposure is computationally able to achieve f/2 to f/16 aperture settings which you can adjust in the processing software to manipulate the effective focus zone, both in-camera and on your computer...
Fun stuff ... and rather different from lens dynamics on cameras with formats bigger than a quarter the size of your little fingernail.
🙂
G
