We are on the verge of a historic occasion, the impending release of iOS 10.1 for the iPhone7+.... making it the first phone camera that can produce a decent portrait, with a nicely blurred background and a reasonable focal length, flattering for the foreground subject compared to the typical phone's wide-angle lens.
I've been using the beta to test this new portrait mode and have found that, considering that it's purely computational-photography based (as compared to traditional optical photography) and blurring the background solely by using a z-depth map produced by the 28mm (equivalent) wide angle len, then compositing that background into the foreground shot by the 56mm lens, the results are outstanding. Yes, there are issues (you need a ton of light to make it happen well and it's not optically perfect), but WHOA!... these are real portraits, made by a
"camera" you can carry with you all the time.
For me, as a portrait photographer, this is a revelation.
Here are some examples of what I've done with it over the past few days. (BGR.COM wrote a nice article about it as well.)
Thanks for watching.
I have a long history of inventing tools for animators and also making films and photographs. My wife, daughter and I live at the foot of beautiful Mt. Tamalpais on the San Francisco Bay and I've been using technology to tell complex stories for a long time. My biggest claim to fame? Leading the team that created Autodesk 3ds Max... the most popular 3D animation tool of all time. When I sold the Yost Group to Autodesk at the end of the last century I jumped headfirst into pursing my original love... photography and filmmaking. Now I spend all of my time exploring the mysteries of my world with my cameras, and revealing what I find in my images and films.
You can find my verification post here.