Xperia 1 VI in the field - Nature Photography Test

This, my friends, is the brand new Xperia 1 Mark VI. And I'm taking it out on a photography adventure to see how it performs out in the field. Everything from the new and improved optical zoom lens, the new macro mode, the super cool bokeh mode, and there's also a brand new camera app we're taking a closer look at. So, as usual, lay back, have a snack, and let's go. Well, hello there. So, it feels fantastic to be out again. And not only outside in nature with the brand new Xperia 1 Mark VI. I've been looking forward to this for so long and I can't wait to try this out. Let's go. Oh, it's starting to bloom. Look at this. If you only knew how good this makes me feel. So, there's actually a little bit of a cliff. I really like the green with the kind of orange grass here. Okay, I really like the details of the green right here. I'm going to show you. That's nice. So, the first thing I noticed when I unpacked this bad boy was how nice the new form factor feels. I'm a big fan of this. It's a bit wider, not as tall as the previous one. So, I'm a very big fan of the new form factor. Glad to see that upgrade. Wow, this was so cool. Look at that rock right there. It's very tricky to expose because if you take a look at here, the shadows are very dark and the highlights are super bright. So, a little trick is to basically use the regular photo mode because then the phone will do its computational processing and it will expose for both the sky and for the shadows. As you can see here, we still have details in the shadows and as well as in the highlights without blowing out like anything. I think I'm at the top. One of the things that I'm most excited about with the Xperia 1 Mark VI is the new and improved optical zoom lens. Compared to the previous Xperia 1 Mark V, we now have 85-170mm instead of the V's 85-125mm. And it's also been improved in image quality. So, it can produce sharper photos with even more reach and I'm very glad to see such an improvement here. But I think many people underestimate the power of a telephoto zoom. The first thing many people think about is that you can reach far. You can photograph things that are far away. And sure, you can do that with a telephoto and that is one of the main things to do with a telephoto zoom. But it's when you combine a subject that is fairly close to you with a telephoto zoom, you get those portrait photos with a blurry background and that is, to me, where the magic happens. So, the Xperia 1 Mark VI has a 16mm ultra-wide lens, a 24mm wide, a 48mm and then the 85-170mm. So, while I enjoy the view up here and catch my breath for a bit, we're going to take a look at when I try to photograph some birds in my garden with the Xperia 1 Mark VI. I'll see you soon. So, if you follow this channel, you might know that I have this bird feeding station that I use as a photo studio sometimes. And I have the Xperia 1 Mark VI right here and I figured we're going to try to take some photos of the birds visiting the station. And then I'm going to just kind of sit and wait with the remote controller, have a coffee and see what we can capture basically. So, this one is pretty nice. It's really lightweight, easy to place and pretty thin. I like when photographing small birds, it's very nice to have a thin branch. Otherwise, I feel like the branch is kind of eating up the beauty of the bird somehow. Let's see if we have some activity. There's a little activity, nice. Well, the stick is up and ready to use. I think it's time to place the phone. I'm going to start off with this stick because I know that they reduce to that. So, the chances that they're landing on this one is bigger than this one at the start. So, I think the biggest chance of them landing is right there. So, we're going to start off with that and let's go into Pro. Set the ISO to the lowest. We're going to go to 85, I think. Just to be sure, I think we're going to go with manual focus for this one. Let's do a focus check. Are we sharp? Yes, we are. And the last check before we go and have a coffee. Are we paired up? Oh, yes, we are. I'll leave it for you. They are closing in. They seem to like the new stick, but I kind of feel that I was wrong about where to place the framing. So, I'm going to reframe the camera a bit. So, I think I'm going to use the 170 millimeter now and back up a little bit. So, let's see if they perch in frame. Oh, that's so close. Look at the details, the sharpness. I'm impressed. Like, look at this. So, this phone has a brand new macro feature which uses the telephoto lens of the camera instead of the wide that I've seen on other phones in the past. So, what's good about using the telephoto for macro is that you don't need to be super close to your subject and block all of the light. But you can, however, get very close, down to four centimeters. And I think this opens up for some very interesting photos that, in my opinion, does not look like something coming out of a phone. Look at this. I don't know if you can see it, but it's super steep here. But I do. I do see a little bit of beach down there. And the water is so still. Lovely. But I think the beach is underwater. That is not what I expected. We need to work with what we have. And we have a little bit of, like, you know, the waves in the sand beneath the water. I'm gonna try to use the telephoto lens, like the 85 or somewhere in between. And then use a circular polarizing filter to get rid of the reflections to really, hopefully, see the bottom and the sand really well. We're gonna try. And maybe there. Okay, I cannot see the sand at all. That is interesting. I hope this will work. This is what it looks like without the the circular polarizing filter. And this is what it looks like with it. The reflections are gone. Isn't that pretty crazy? So I hear water flowing somewhere over there. So I'm gonna head that direction. But it's a freaking swamp here. So it's so wet. So a very welcome upgrade is that we now can shoot 48 megapixel photos. And you find this under more inside of the new camera app. And just look at this. You can basically just zoom and zoom and zoom. And the details are insane. And I think this is very powerful because then you can later on, in post, crop in to find new compositions within your photo and still have resolution left that it doesn't look like pixelated and, yeah, cropped in. So I'm very glad to see this upgrade on the Xperia 1 Mark 6. So the new camera app is much more straightforward and easy to use. And they also put photo and video into the same app. So you don't have to switch between two different apps anymore. But I also know many of you love the possibility with Photography Pro. And I'm one of them. But by going into Pro, you can still access all of the different controls and settings that we had in Photography Pro, which I'm very glad to see. Because personally, the manual controls is one of the absolute best things about the Xperia phones, in my opinion. So I'm very glad to see that they kept the manual and more advanced controls for us who want it, but have made the app easier to understand and use for people who don't want it. And sometimes, believe it or not, I just want to snap a photo of my children without having to think about camera settings. So we're going to meet up with somebody somewhere in these forests that might have something pretty cool that we can try the cameras on. Yeah, let's go. So two hours ago, it was hailing and snowing. Now I'm sweating and warm and it feels like spring again. This is so typical Sweden. So when you're dressed up like in the morning, you have a lot of clothes on. You're super toasty warm. But then in the afternoon, you need shorts and a t-shirt. And yeah, so I hear something. That is one badass car. Hello. Hey. What a coincidence to see you here. Who could have thought? So this is Theo, and I reached out to him on Instagram to yeah, I wanted a cool car and he came up on our For You page. And I thought, why not reach out? And here we are. I'm glad you did. I guess this is our subject for the evening. And also this guy, because you are going to model for me. That's not my strong side, but whatever. Like these tires, they are freaking huge. They're not fun to put on and off during winter and summer. They must weigh so much. Like, is this a door? Yes, this is where I sleep. Sometimes a lot of stuff right now, but I'm moving so. So you use it as like a camper van. Yeah. And this is your baby as well, I guess. Yep. My favorite lens. Sony 200-600. I absolutely love that lens. And this is freaking badass. Snorkel so I can go underwater. You can drive between Sweden and Denmark. Yes. Like without the bridge. I don't need a bridge. Yeah, you can just go. And then we have the super, ah, that's so cool. So if you watched my previous video about the Xperia 5 Mark V, you know that I was blown away by the new and improved bokeh mode that that phone offers. And on the Xperia 1 Mark VI, we now have this new improved bokeh mode, but it now works on the 24mm lens, the 48mm, and 85mm, and the 170mm. Warm up the photo a little bit because this is a very warm, beautiful forest. See how that works. That's so cool. Try to get it. Perfect. Look at this. That's actually amazing. But we haven't tried the like the 85mm to 170mm and I really want to do that. It's actually so good. It actually looks like almost like a full frame. Like I could not tell from these pictures. No, not by looking like this. No, I couldn't tell the difference. I am blown away again. It works fantastic. And I think it's incredible how the quality of the background blur looks. It looks very real. And like everything from the cutout to the amount of blur is looking very natural. And again, as I said in my other video, this is the best bokeh mode I've ever tried on a phone. And my favorite focal length to use with the bokeh mode is the 2x. And that's equivalent to 48mm, which is very, very close to 50mm, which is my favorite focal length to shoot like portraits and products and stuff with. Is it snow or hail or what is it? Yeah, it's snow. Great. It's starting to get dark, so it's time to go look for a composition for the car. And I can just imagine like the headlights and the lights on the roof being lit up in a forest. It's going to look pretty freaking cool, hopefully. I think it's time to get some photos of the car and look at the light. So Tio is up there turning the car and 48mm looks great. And I'm going to drag down the ISO as low as possible. Nice. Oh, this looks cool. Okay, so I'm going to back up a bit. Look at this. I really like the composition here. So I don't know if you can see, but there are grid lines here. The road is going right here to the cross right there. Then there's a car and then the road is continuing to the other cross in the grid line. So I'm going to ask Tio to pass with the car pretty fast. I'm going to use the 24mm and a fairly low shutter speed, because now we can do that because it's pretty dark. So as you can see, when I move the camera like this, you get some really nice motion blur. I'm going to try to follow the car when he comes like this to get the effect that he's driving pretty fast. And the slower the shutter speed, the more motion blur, but it's also much harder to actually get the car in focus. So I think I'm going to start off with 1 over 30 and try to match his speed and see if it can turn out something. I forgot to put the camera in burst mode. That's a pretty good setting to have when doing something like this. And the very nice thing is that this phone can shoot 30 photos a second, which is very fast. It's as fast as the Sony A1. So then we'll have a lot of photos to shoot from, which is nice. That's cool. It kind of looks like it's photoshopped. Really get some sense of speed. Look at that. Looks like it's going super fast, but in reality, it's not that fast. So we were looking for a spruce tree forest, and we haven't found any until now. And so look at this. How beautiful. That is exactly what we want. That's so nice. Glömde burst mode. I really, really like how the framing turned out. Look at the trees and it's kind of a circle around the car. That's definitely better than the last one. That's nice. So after I've been using this device now for a while to make this video, a very nice thing I noticed pretty quickly is that the improved battery life this phone is said to have really is noticeable and not just fancy words. And a big factor for the great battery life is that the screen is now full HD plus instead of 4K. And personally, I'm glad Sony went this way, like giving us better battery performance, because like long battery life is something I value much more than having like a 4K screen. And to be honest, I can't see a difference when using the phone for like regular use. So the full HD plus resolution hasn't been a problem for me whatsoever. And as a final note, which hasn't like anything to do with the phone's capabilities or features, but I just want to mention that Sony has an initiative where they're working towards a zero environmental footprint. So for example, the box that the Xperia phones comes in has been created with environmentally conscious and recycled material. And 85% of the plastic parts inside of this phone has been made from recycled plastic, which I think is a very good step in the right direction. Well, it's getting pretty late. So after a full day of shooting and having fun, it was time to say goodbye to Tio. And later that night, something pretty cool happened. So I was just about to go to bed when the like the Northern Light app just said, hey, you should go outside. And I did. And I think we have some Northern Lights. I can see a spike on the sky. So the thing with Northern Lights down here in Sweden is that it has to be very strong for us to see it like in the southern part of Sweden. And it's a matter of seconds sometimes. So I really need to capture this.