Night-Time Photography With the iPhone 12 Pro Max

The camera on the iPhone 12 Pro Max is preposterously good. I know this is hardly a revelation at this point, and much more talented and well informed people have made this observation already, but it’s kind of eerie how good it is in ways that one has come to expect a phone camera to be bad.

Perhaps the most striking example of that is night time photography. For ages the Google Pixel enjoyed being miles better than the iPhone in this regard, and the photos taken from those phones already seemed like magic - but this new iPhone is on another level entirely.

Here’s a quick shot I took out the front of our house this evening in the pitch dark - sure, the sky is too bright, but that you can see anything more than a bunch of blown out blurs of light where the windows are is evidence of how far things have come in the last couple of years. Until recently I was using an iPhone XS Max and I never bothered taking photographs at night with it because the results were guaranteed to be garbage.

Published on 23 December 2020 – iPhone – Camera – Photography