Will a phone ever be anywhere as good as a DSLR?

If you don’t care about sensor size or optics, then a good phone camera works. But I do notice there is more noise in your S23 picture: look at the window reflection.

The whole selling point of dedicated cameras is sensor size and optics, which will never fit inside a phone. I was initially talked into buying a bridge camera with a small sensor (said to be good enough for airborne pictures) and returned it the next day because of that. Instead I bought a hybrid camera with a 4/3 sensor, which never felt as limiting.

Yep, AFAIK all digital cameras shot raw, as there is fair amount of processing that really needs to be done via a microprocessor. I.e. it’s not something that is practical or smart to implement within the sensor.
To keep the raw, you just have to keep the input stream that comes off the sensor chip, rather than through it away. The dumb thing in this case is they have already written the code the put the sensor stream in a file…

Off topic, but I have a Panasonic Lumix DC-SZ80. The picture quality at normal zoom settings is no better than my iPhone 12, but it has the huge advantage of x30 optical zoom. So if you want good ultra-telephoto pictures, it is superb. Though these days I rarely bother to carry it, so on the rare occasions when it would be useful, I don’t have it.

Well, I just bought an APSC mirrorless camera (A Leica CL – probably a bad choice as I think you can get more for your money – but it pleases me). I bought it after a holiday to Japan, to which I decided not to take my DSLR as it is just too big. The mobile was OK, but its limitations became ever more apparent over the duration of the holiday, so I found myself looking for something smaller that I still considered to be a proper camera. Perhaps because I’ve been out of photography for so long and don’t really know what’s available, I’ve not been disappointed at all. It outperforms my old 5D in almost every respect, in a package that is a fraction of the weight.

The main advantage the camera has over a mobile phone, is that I can hold it with one hand and adjust the aperture and shutter speed and press the shutter release without taking my hand off the aircraft controls. Also the viewfinder, which is much more practical than a screen in bright sunlight. I have settled on a 50mm lens (80mm equivalent in full-frame-speak) because otherwise it’s hard to get the wing out of the frame. I plan my flightpath to get the picture I want; when the moment comes, I tilt the wing slightly out of the way, frame my picture roughly, then return to straight-and-level. I couldn’t do this with my mobile as I would need both hands to operate it. I find that I need much higher shutter speeds than I was expecting, and have lost a lot of otherwise nice shots because of this. Presumably a good phone will take care of this… If not, then I can’t see how it would be at all useful in the air.

My brother was horrified at the idea of taking a picture whilst flying, and I think that’s up for debate. It certainly wouldn’t be a good idea in a slippery aircraft, but in something slow I think it’s more down to keeping a good lookout and situational awareness and not letting your attention be drawn from flying for more than a few seconds. I am coming to the idea of doing more planning e.g. working out minimum altitudes in advance, and looking for pictures from the satellite view on Google Maps. I went to photograph a friend’s display garden the other day, and couldn’t find it for the life of me! I had the correct GPS co-ordinates, but I hadn’t correctly anticipated what it would look like from the air.

One of the problems with aerial photography is that everything is at infinity, so it’s hard to use focus to segment out foreground and background. A tilt lens puts this tool back in your hands, but as we’re only used to seeing shallow depths of field in close-ups, it can give the impression that whatever you photograph is a miniature model.
One feature of mirrorless is that you can adapt old DSLR lenses to them, so I put an old 50mm lens on a tilt-adapter and I think the effect has its place… but then I realised that it would be simple to achieve the same effect digitally with any image from either a phone or a camera – and much less tricky to get the blur exactly where you want it.

Perhaps the effect is best when used very lightly, in this case to blur the region behind the castle only subtly.

When the aurora came, I was very glad to have a nice camera again, but was amused to find that I was one of only two people I saw that night who was using one! There were hundreds of students with mobile phones. The message was clear: cameras are clearly an old-people thing, and I must therefore now be an old person.

Great pictures ! Leica are indeed the best ones out there. Less overrated than Canon and Sony IMO.

As for what’s available, the best “bang for buck” would be to purchase a cheap-ish body with a great sensor and then purchase compatible Leica lenses (Lumix series in particular – some lenses are pure Panasonic and some are Leica). Other manufacturers have equivalent product ranges with good compatibility between bodies and high end lenses.

Bridge cameras (i.e. mirrorless) and the micro-4/3 format in particular are very popular right now, because they’re much less bulky while retaining excellent sensors (albeit with a slightly smaller sensor size). The upside is that you can bring a 800mm equivalent lens in a regular camera bag (think of how much space a full frame 800mm takes…)

With bridges you can get very compact bodies like the G9X (similar in size to the Leica you got), but I prefer the big grip of more traditionally shaped bodies (G9/G90). All are fairly light and practical to use with one hand.

Leica are really up there in both lenses and cameras.
To be a bit picky I don’t think there is the digital equivalent of a full frame camera on the market At 8in x 10in format would certainly require a huge lens to bring 800mm to whole plate. Possibly as big as the aircraft itself.🙂
I.don’t know the Leica CL but it would be great of you could use lenses from the old Leica film camera.
A guy I was at art school with (but a few years behind) went on to become a war photographer and some of his B+W stuff during the Vietnam War and in Northern Ireland is incredible. All taken on an old Leica with range finder.