[amluto]

> Apple's horrible tech featured in the article had nothing to do with the lighting.

Of course it did.

iPhones take an “exposure” (scare quotes quite intentional) of a certain length. A conventional camera taking an exposure literally integrates the light hitting each sensor pixel (or region of film) during the exposure. iPhone do not — instead (for long enough exposures), iPhones take many pictures, aka a video, and apply fancy algorithms to squash that video back to a still image.

But all the data comes from the video, with length equal to the “exposure”. Apple is not doing Samsung-style “it looks like an arm/moon, so paint one in”. So this image had the subject moving her arms such that all the arm positions in the final image happened during the “exposure”.

Which means the “exposure” was moderately long, which means the light was dim. In bright light, iPhones take a short exposure just like any other camera, and the effect in question won’t happen.

(Okay, I’m extrapolating from observed behavior and from reading descriptions from Google of similar tech and from reading descriptions of astrophotography techniques. But I’m fairly confident that I’m right.)

[Kye]

This is probably harder for people to believe if they've never seen a progress video of stacking long exposures.

I've seen the kinds of images people get out of stacking images for astrophotography. Individually, the images are mostly noise. Put enough together and you get stuff like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20230512210222/https://imgur.com... (https://old.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/3gx29m/st...)

The phone is operating under way less harsh conditions since there's usually quite a bit of light even in most night scenes.

The iPhone is actually too good at this. You can't do light trails: it over-weights the first image and removes anything too divergent when stacking, so you get a well-lit frozen scene of vehicles on the road. I can get around it shooting in burst mode and stack in something like Affinity Photo, but that's work.

[amluto]

I would argue that it’s both more and less harsh. The available light is probably better, but the astrophotography use case generally benefits from tripods and compensated or at least predictable movement of the subject. On the other hand, astrophotography needs to deal with atmospheric effects, and people aren’t usually taking night mode iPhone photos through the turbulent air above a flame.

[astrange]

It could also have been taken with too much motion (either the phone or the subject), meaning some of the closer-in-time exposures would be rejected because they're blurry/have rolling shutter.