I was experimenting with an interesting technique to shoot birds with my smartphone, purely out of curiosity and fun recently. I attached the Olympus 75-300mm II super telephoto zoom lens onto my smartphone, Poco X6 Pro, well, technically the Olympus 75-300mm II lens was mounted on Olympus Air, a camera module that was then connected to the smartphone wirelessly. I thought this method was quite fun, and it worked really well. I went to Kuala Lumpur Bird Park to get some bird images; some I was quite happy with. I shared the video screenshot of the viewfinder of my smartphone while capturing these bird shots, you can find the full video here (click).
The longest lens in smartphone camera module at the time of writing is 240mm at the longest end (Samsung S21 Ultra, Huawei P40 Pro), which is not sufficient for any meaningful bird shooting. Additionally, the telephoto camera module in any smartphone used much smaller image sensor (to add to the longer crop factor) which in turn compromised significantly when it comes to image quality. Basically, any 10x to 100x zoom capability of the smartphone camera as advertised was technically useless for any proper bird photography.
This setup of Olympus 75-300mm II + Olympus Air + Smartphone was quite straightforward. The main benefit was in the use of a real telephoto zoom lens, with large glass, you get true 600mm equivalent reach, which got really close to the birds allowing the capture of sharp images with plenty of useful fine details. The lens was mounted on Olympus Air, a camera module featuring a full-sized large Micro Four Thirds sensor, much larger than any smartphone telephoto camera module, and the larger sensor produced much high resolution, sharpness, better dynamic range and high ISO shooting. Combining the benefits of true optics and large image sensor, you get much better results when doing bird photography.
Then there was the problem of aggressive image processing by smartphones. The over-eager noise reduction, crazy high sharpening with ugly artifacts and ugly HDR rendering creating fake, overbaked looking images with unnatural colors, all the downsides of smartphone photography using software and AI computational processing gone too far. With Olympus Air, using Micro Four Thirds system, the image quality from this combo was already so good, you don't need any artificial processing to fix any issues. You get more organic, natural and pleasing looking images with real sharpness.
Of course, this setup was not ideal, it did come with some challenges. Handling was the biggest issue here, no doubt this setup was not designed for handling long telephoto lenses, and definitely not suited to shoot birds. A proper camera with beefy grip was much appropriate to balance larger and longer lenses like the Olympus 75-300mm II and can provide better stability when shooting at the longer focal lengths. Then there was the issue of connectivity with a camera launched almost 10 years ago, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology back then were not robust enough to give a smooth, lag-free shooting experience through the smartphone.
This setup was just an experiment, as I have mentioned at the beginning, and I won't recommend anyone to try it. If you are serious about shooting birds, go get a real camera, it will save you a lot of headaches. There are many things that smartphone cameras cannot do yet, and having a camera can open up a different world of imaging possibilities for you too. As a photographer, I am infinitely curious, and I do want to play around and try different things. Only through trial and error I can actually grow and improve!
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