So, we live in Lapland. With our FP5 (default android) we used to take decent photos of aurora borealis by night. While the FP4 can’t do nothing, which I’m fine with.
But then mid September, overnight without any reason (didn’t fell, didn’t changed anything myself) the photos became really bad, a pixel soup. Tried every settings in default photo app, tried the photo settings reset, tried another app (simple camera, OSS one from fdroid), not better. Waited a while in case of an upgrade that would fix algorithm or such OS or hardware wise, nothing.
Now I’m just so angry at this, a perfectly fine something just went to hell “because”. Bought Fairphone so it would last. Now I feel like an Apple customer …
So to understand correctly. In the past you could take good pics of aurora and now its no longer possible and you did use the same mode/settings?
Can you comfirm, the pics you uploaded are the good or the bad ones? The first looks as if you have used wide angle? Wide angel pics are still not really good with dayligh, so would not advise to use in dark.
Updates don’t install automatically, either, so you would have noticed if you had installed an update here? Nevertheless you could check the release notes of the FPOS updates in that timeframe if anything sounds suspicious.
Well to take pics of aurora borrealis, I would never use auto mode and always have a tripod and use pro-mode and adapt settings as needed in each specific night. For me its rather a surprise you could take good pics in the beginning.
Although both pics are taken in same mode the whole scene is so different, with more artificial light in the first and I guess the cam focus was rather at the house lights.
Just brainstorming.
August update for FP5 included camera improvements, September one does not seem to include any of those. What’s your update history, do you recall when you installed those?
Do you use night mode for these pictures? Automatic AI scene reconnection?
I think you could also check the parameters of the pictures, already taken, like most likely you will be able to check the light exposure and compare
But mine, or rather my wife who’s the FP5 user is different. She ain’t a photographer or even a geek. She just want nice photos to share with the family. She’s into ecological & ethical values, hence she’s happy with Fairphone values. But not if she can’t take photos easily, Which exclude fiddling with “pro mode” settings. “night mode” would be okay, but doesn’t work better at the moment. Basically if I can’t fix it, it’ll end up finding a 2nd hand photo phone that take decent pictures, and I don’t want that.
About the pics, I uploaded only two because the forum is a bit tedious here, can’t upload 2 pics on the same post. But if you ignore the difference in the photos scenes, you should see my point : the “pre issue” photo got decent curves & gradiant, on a smaller screen it’s looking nice. Maybe not on your computer HD screen, granted. Then the photo “after issue”, you just can’t keep it, it’s a pixel soup, one can see straight away how there’s nothing regular in it. I asked my wife to keep some for the example, otherwise it’s direct delete. I’ll upload a couple more to illustrate further.
August update for FP5 included camera improvements, September one does not seem to include any of those. What’s your update history, do you recall when you installed those?
I don’t recall which update went through when, I can tell you it broke between 12th & 13th of september. Wondering if the August update could have been applied mid september without my knowledge, as in an auto update in the background ? For sure I didn’t applied one explicitely then, it was the last day at home for a guest.
When I see this correctly this was an exposure time of 0.08 seconds? This should be 4-8 seconds at least and the ISO was 18thousand? That should be way lower. The higher the ISO the worse is the image noise. So I really suggest to not use any auto mode. nevertheless to come back to this
I doubt Nighmode was used for this EXIF example due to exposure time
And although it might crash the phone, test the App I linked above and use RAW mode, then you can adjust as well later e.g. with this rawtherapee
I totally get your wife’s point of view.
I work as an aurora guide, and just want to show my guests the aurora, no professional photographing, as I work ship based. I now have to ask my guests to take a picture, so see and share the aurora.
I hope it will be able to photograph the aurora again, as this was the reason to buy an FP5 (I already owned the FP4, and was besides the camera happy with it.)
Some of my colleagues tried FP, went back to iphone, simply because it was not possible to photograph the aurora.
Hope will not change anything nor will the community be able to change that.
Pretty sure it is possible to take pictures of aurora with the FP5, maybe not always with auto settings as discussed above, so it needs a few minutes to take the time and adjust a few settings as needed in the specific moment.
For change, contactsupport and provide detailed info about OS Verisons to see if any update cqn have influenced that
