HTC One (M8) camera images (Part one, at the zoo)

Please check out the notes below the photo gallery for an explanation of some of the results.

Video sample

My notes

As is quite clear from the photos using the uFocus/bokeh effects, it simply doesn’t work if there’s a lot of other things in the photo at the same depth as your chosen focus point.

What happens, as can be seen here, is that you get other parts of the photo coming into focus or having the filter applied.

Now you might say that this is bloody obvious and question why I even took the photos, let alone ran them through the filters – but I felt it important to show the limitations of the features, and how it would differ from using a professional camera, or even perhaps other software filters that would work on a single ‘flat’ image without any extra data.

It means that to get the best effect from any of the filters, you need to spend some time making sure the conditions are all correct.

In practice, the simple way to do this is to have no other objects in view (trees, fences, posts, signs etc), or to make sure there’s a big distance between the foreground and background with nothing in-between.

And this makes me think that this mode really won’t be as fun or popular as Instagram for making ordinary photos look more interesting, as the results will usually be disappointing – or take up a lot of your time trying to play around with the photo, when you probably just want to do as little as possible and click ‘share’.

Frankly, I’d rather just get some good, bog standard, photos instead.

– This is one of the first of a series of tests of the camera, which will include different environments and lighting, as well as more use of video and the front-facing camera.