I had three flagship phones on three different tripods all pointed at the sun that was quickly being crowded out by an annoying moon, and all I wanted was one or two excellent eclipse shots.
Turns out, photographing a solar eclipse with your smartphone isn't that easy. In fact, discovering a reproducible procedure without retinal cauterization is quite difficult. But I did it. I grabbed some of the best smartphones money can buy, like the iPhone 15 Pro Max, Google Pixel 8 Pro, and Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and got ready for 180 minutes of heavenly excitement.
This last choice may turn some heads. It is, after all, an old flagship Android phone now and doesn't have the latest image processing or even the faster Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip found in the Galaxy S24 Ultra (the S23 Ultra has Gen 2). However, one thing none of my other flagship smartphones offer is 10X optical zoom (not even the S24 Ultra has that).
Throughout this endeavor, I committed to using no enhancements, letting the phones' zoom lenses do their best work without digital magic. I did not pinch and zoom. I just point each phone at the eclipse and press the shutter.
Make the modification
Except once I did this, I realized it wasn't going to work. The sun naturally hits all phones. It's not that I haven't taken pictures of the sun before. I took quite a few photos with my iPhone and to combat the blowout, I tapped the sun on the screen which speeded up the exposure to lower the light and bring out the definition of the sun.
The eclipse wreaks havoc on smartphone exposure controls, and the more the moon blocks the sun, the more intense the light becomes. The solution I provided was simple and you've probably seen it elsewhere. I took my Celestron eclipse glasses and carefully placed one magnifying glass film over each phone's zoom lens. If you have trouble deciding which camera to zoom in, simply open the Camera app, select the maximum optical zoom, and place your finger over each camera lens until you see your finger on the screen.
Sunglasses helped reduce massive glare. Next, I tapped the screen and adjusted the exposure so I could see the sun getting the Pac-man treatment from the moon. In most cases, the result was a very orange-looking sun.
Over the next hour or so, I moved from phone to phone, repositioning tripods, lining myself up with the sun, and snapping away.
There were some non-smartphone missteps, like cloud cover before our peak total (90% where I live), but I was more successful than I expected and the smartphones were, for the most part, up to the challenge.
Not all smartphone cameras are created equal
You'll see some of my comparisons above and below (I used the best of all the phones in the shots above) which I didn't resize or enhance, other than cropping them where possible to show them side by side.
While the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Pixel 8 Pro shoot at 12MP (the latter omitting the 48MP sensor, meaning four pixels are combined into one whole), the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra's 10X zoom camera is just 10MP. I think these numbers affect the overall quality.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro matches the 5x zoom of the iPhone 15 Pro Max and at times looked sharper than the iPhone or Galaxy S23 Ultra, but I also had more difficulty with the Pixel 8 to capture a properly exposed shot. It was also the only phone that forced a long exposure past the peak of 90% coverage. The good news is that some of those long exposures provided most of the atmosphere, and I was able to gather some cloud cover that obscured my full view of the eclipse.
Things get even more interesting with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and its 5x Tertrapism lens. The eclipse looks a little closer than it does on the Pixel 8 Pro, but it's also more vibrant. There are a few iPhone 15 Pro Max photos where I can see the clouds and they are very beautiful. As with all phones, this photo shoot was a bit of a hit. The colors went from orange to almost black and white, and staying focused was difficult. When I was able to take a decent photo, I was thrilled.
The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra's 10x optical zoom brought me tantalizingly close to the eclipse. It was definitely easier to get the exposure and focus right. At a glance, the S23's images are better but closer inspection reveals a great deal of graininess, to the point that some almost look like paintings and rough canvas.
As I delved into all the images, I noticed how each phone camera uses ISO settings to manage image capture and quality. The iPhone 15 Pro Max's sensitivity ranged from ISO 50 (very slow light capture) to ISO 800 (very fast for super-bright situations and action shots). Naturally, those at the top end of the spectrum are just as grainy as those on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, which range from as low as ISO 250 to 800.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro has the widest range from the low ISO 16 up to the amazing ISO 1,536. He used this to capture 90% of the sun eclipsed behind the clouds. Aesthetically, it's one of the best shots.
If I had to pick a winner here, it would be the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra by the nose. This extra optical magnification means you have more detail before graininess appears.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max comes in a very close second, but only because it was easier to take a good shot. I also think that if it had more optical zoom, the iPhone's powerful image processing would have outperformed the year-old Galaxy.
The Google Pixel Pro 8 has some great shots but it also has a lot of bad shots because I couldn't stabilize it on the proximity of the sun and moon. She also suffered the most when it came to exposure. However, I was impressed with the ISO range and clarity of some shots.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max and Google Pixel 8 Pro also deserve a special mention for producing my two favorite shots. It's not the closest or clearest, but by capturing some of the clouds, it adds an ethereal, atmospheric element.
If I live long enough to see another eclipse (there will be one in the US Midwest in 2044), I'll look up special eclipse filters on smartphones and try again. By then, we could have 200x optical zoom cameras with 1000MP sensors.
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