Over the years I’ve experimented with different strategies for photographing moths – macro lenses, external phone attachments, but I always come back to using the phone itself. For your average noctuid-sized moths, the quality and clarity are quite high, and you sure can’t beat the convenience. When you have to photograph literally hundreds of moths in a single morning before the sun gets too high in the sky, you need something quick. Fussing around with a full-on macro setup simply isn’t practical. I’m not out to win photography awards here: I just want a way to take the highest quality shot with the minimum difficulty.

I typically flip back and forth between iPhone and Android devices (especially Pixels), depending on the camera specs. My last model was a Pixel 7 and despite the occasional atrocious software update from Google (I still haven’t forgiven them for their last appalling “update” to the image editing software), the devices lasted pretty well.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I upgraded to a Pixel 11 – yikes! It’s well known that every edition of the Pixel has something wrong with it, and unfortunately this time it was the hardware itself. They introduced something called HiLight which rendered the flash virtually useless for nocturnal insect photos. I spent an evening reading Reddit and doing failed experiments to take any photo of any value. The next day I returned it.

So instead, since I was just in Singapore, I picked up a Vivo x300. It’s a pretty well-known phone in Asia – not so much here. The hardware is excellent. The main camera has a whopping 200 megapixel for ultra-detail (4x that of the Pixels) and it shows in the photographs – far more detail than I’ve been able to achieve before.

This being mushroom season, the last couple of days I’ve been outside photographing as much fungi as I can find, and I’m starting to develop a feel for the phone.

• When the camera is good, it’s excellent. Significantly more detail than my old Pixel phone. Some of the photos are absolutely bang-on, I’m quite delighted. With moths I’m now seeing the individual scales very clearly.
• Macro-macro (i.e. super small) is vastly better too. One of the reasons I picked up a macro lens for my Nikon was because my phone just couldn’t handle the really small moths. But I ended up using it pretty infrequently due to the lack of focus depth and sheer inconvenience. The Vivo a noticeable improvement over the Pixel here.
• The software is quite poor. Much as the Pixels drove me crazy with poorly tested, unwanted updates, this is a marked step down. When you zoom in, it switches between different cameras on the back (there are 3) and often gets confused. The quality frequently drops to nought and I have to zoom and reposition the phone for a while to convince it to focus properly. Overall, it requires more time to take the shots – but still nothing compared to taking macro shots on my Nikon. I’m hoping with more practice I’ll learn its idiosyncrasies.
• The flash typically causes overexposure. Here, I may be at fault. I’m used to getting very close to the target and using flash; it seems like with this new phone I need to photograph it from much further away. Again, more experimentation needed.

So it’s been a mixed result, but definitely an improvement. For now, I’m keeping my old Pixel 7 on standby. We’ll see how it goes.