Recently, with the arrival of a wide range of strong rain and snow weather, many small partners in the south must have felt the happiness of a lot of snow during the Spring Festival. In this process, in addition to snowball fights and building snowmen, many friends will obviously want to record this rare snow scene.
Of course, if you only want to take a "snow scene" in the general sense, then it probably won't be very difficult. After all, the snow of the white flower has a strong reflective ability, even if it is cloudy, even if it is an entry-level model, the photo effect in the snow is not much worse.
But if you have a whim and want to use your mobile phone to photograph the legendary snowflakes with varied shapes and exquisite structures, you may find that this is a subject that is far more difficult than imagined.
Why is it so difficult to shoot snowflakes with a mobile phone? The first thing that everyone can understand is that the snowflake itself is an extremely small structure, and because it is essentially a delicate ice crystal, it means that its color is not actually white, but a nearly transparent color.
Mobile phone main camera close to the snow will find that the focus is not on? This is normal
Speaking of this, I believe that some friends who have a little understanding of mobile phone shooting hardware have reacted, for their own ultra-small size, but also transparent, but also reflective objects, almost all models of the main camera is impossible to work. One is because the magnification of the main camera is too low to see the microstructure of the snowflakes; the other is because at low magnification, CMOS cannot focus on objects that may be only slightly larger than a pixel — not to mention that it is reflective or transparent.
So, if we use the "macro lens" of the mobile phone, can we shoot snowflakes? Theoretically, it's possible. Because some models are now equipped with ultra-macro lenses, they do have 30 times, 40 times, or even 60 times the magnification capacity, and their focus structure is often specially designed for "taking pictures close to the subject".
Using a model with a microscope sub-camera, you can photograph... What the snowflakes look like after they melt
If you really try this, you will find that it is still impossible. Why? Because in addition to the SoC in the mobile phone, the camera is actually a component with high energy consumption when working. While you may not feel it at all, if you bring a working macro camera closer to a snowflake, it will melt almost instantaneously and destroy the structure of the snowflake. So the final photograph is likely to be just a pool of water, or a bunch of semi-melted ice crystal particles, and the original shape of the snowflakes cannot be seen at all.
Then the really feasible solution is actually ready to come out. In order to capture the details of snowflakes with a mobile phone, we must keep the fuselage away from the snowflakes being photographed so that it remains cool, while the mobile phone (lens) must be able to provide a high enough magnification and strong enough focus performance. In other words, a telephoto lens with high magnification and strong macro shooting capabilities is the only way to "shoot snowflakes".
However, when we look at the entire mobile phone industry with such expectations, we will find that telephoto lenses with both "high magnification" and "strong macro focus design" are almost non-existent.
In the SLR, the "telephoto macro head" is actually a very common product form
Why is this so, is the telephoto lens structurally incompatible with high-performance focusing solutions? Not really. In fact, if you have used a SLR camera, you will know that many high-quality telephoto lenses have strong macro shooting capabilities. This is because "telephoto" is not the same as "looking far", and it is not uncommon to use a telephoto head to zoom in at a high magnification of a close subject in a single reflex and then shoot a fine structure.
Furthermore, among the existing smartphones on sale, we did find very individual models with a 10x physical telephoto lens and (telephoto secondary) full-pixel dual-core focus function, and used it to capture the shape of tiny, snowflake-edged ice crystals without relying on any auxiliary equipment. In fact, this further shows that the design of "high magnification" and "strong macro capability" can completely coexist on the telephoto lens of the mobile phone. For consumers with related needs, such models can provide high-magnification macro shooting capabilities closer to professional cameras, which does have certain use value.
This is already the most obvious, unmelted snowflake we can photograph with our mobile phones
However, in this way, the real problem actually arises. If for smart phones, "macro" is actually completely compatible with "telephoto secondary camera", then why do most models of telephoto lenses on the market do not have a strong focus design and cannot shoot macro objects?
It has to be said that cost is naturally a major factor in it. Taking the model we are using as an example, the reason why its telephoto head has strong macro capability is because all of its secondary cameras (including ultra-wide angle, 3x portrait, 10x telephoto) use dual-core focus CMOS. And of course, the cost is not low, in fact, the original release price of this model ran to five figures, which itself is doomed to be impossible to be a Volkswagen model.
Secondly, it has to be said that the publicity needs and "mindset" of commodities are also reasons that cannot be ignored. A very typical evidence of this aspect is that at the new machine conference of each company, when it comes to demonstrating the "telephoto ability" of the new machine, the manufacturer either shoots the mountain or the building, basically demonstrating a variety of "looking far" scenes. This also shows from one side that the relevant product managers or R & D personnel may indeed not have considered that some consumers still have the need to use the "telephoto" to shoot small objects at close range (zoom).
In such a situation, catering to the "mainstream" demand, the use of lower cost, but the publicity will not be picked out by most consumers "pure telephoto sub-camera", naturally has become the choice of the vast majority of models.
【The pictures in this article are partly from the network】