If you’re at a sporting event like Wimbledon and want to grab some incredible shots, it’s all about ambience, getting close to the action and keeping up with the athletes on the court.
That kind of photography once demanded some serious glass – a telephoto lens and a fast camera to capture bursts of time-stopping clarity. Now, pull out your smartphone, and if you’ve got the right one, you can get championship shots time after time.
Go wide, auto HDR on and fire up Dazzle Colour
When you’re trying to set the scene, backlighting can be a deal breaker on a summer’s day. This is especially true when you’re capturing ultra wide-angle photos that get a lot of sky in frame, like those captured on the 16mm equivalent focal length wide camera on the Oppo Reno 10X Zoom (opens in new tab).
Bright spots can get blown out, while dark scenes can lose their nuance, either overexposing and looking grainy or underexposing and looking like nondescript blobs of black.
Traditionally, digital photographers would have to bracket their shots to cope, and grab all the detail they wanted. What’s bracketing? It involves shooting multiple photos across a range of exposures and then merging them into one HDR (high dynamic range) photo in Photoshop or another dedicated piece of software. In principle, problem solved – but when moving objects were in your frame, manual bracketing could create blur and ghosting.
Now, smartphones like the Oppo Reno 10X Zoom (opens in new tab) can do it all for you, intelligently analyzing the scene, auto-bracketing your snaps in milliseconds, and pulling across detail from the spectrum of tones, from bright white skies through to dark, backlit foreground objects.
To activate Auto HDR, just tap on the HDR button to the left of the viewfinder, select Auto HDR and you’re good to shoot.
For some extra pop in your pictures, the Reno 10X Zoom also features Dazzle Colour Mode pixel-level colour restoration. This creates life-like, vivid hues that will transport you back to a courtside view every time you swipe through your gallery.
Zoom, burst, review, repeat
The Reno 10X can get you from that wide 16mm all the way through to 160mm in under a second with its powerful hybrid zoom. This means, even if you don’t have a front row seat, you can get a front row zoom, thanks to its smart periscope telephoto camera design.
Engaging the zoom couldn’t be simpler – simply tap the ‘1x’ button on the right of the shutter release, and you’re pushed into a 2x zoom. Tap the button again, and you jump into a 6x zoom, and for the ultimate in getting up close and personal with your subject, press it again for a 10x zoom.
When you’ve locked onto your target, be sure to take advantage of the Oppo Reno 10X Zoom (opens in new tab)’s excellent burst mode. Keep your finger on the shutter release and the phone will take 20 photos in lighting-fast succession at full resolution. And, thanks to its incredible image stabilization, even at 10x zoom, it holds everything rock steady.
Fire up 48MP mode for a powerful wide shot
The Oppo Reno 10X Zoom (opens in new tab)’s main camera features a huge 48MP sensor. In automatic mode it shoots at a lower resolution, combining multiple pixels into one for better results across lighting conditions. This is a smart technique called pixel binning, and Oppo’s application means that even in the dead of night you can shoot atmospheric pictures.
When the light is on your side, though, the sun is out but the scene’s contrast levels are manageable, you can activate 48MP mode for an ultra high-res image that’s brimming with detail. These can be cropped into or blown up and printed without engaging the zoom or degrading in quality.
To activate 48MP mode, jump into the camera settings, select photo ratio and choose 4:3 (48MP). The phone’s 10x zoom and HDR are both disabled at this resolution, but if the lighting right, it could be the perfect shooting mode to capture huge amounts of detail with a roughly 26mm wide angle.
There’s more…
There are other ways you can take advantage of the tech in your pocket to capture the best tournament shots possible. Fire up Expert mode, for example, and you can control the shutter speed so that time stands still, or grab some dreamy motion shots when the lights go down. Alternatively, shoot up close and personal incidental macro images that capture the ambience of the event perfectly, with manual focus and exposure.
Of course, you could take an even bigger step back than the 16mm wide-angle enables and capture a panorama of the centre court, and when the match is done, fire up night mode, which helps the Oppo Reno 10X Zoom (opens in new tab) see in the dark.
So whatever type of photo you’re after, the winning image can be captured when you have the right tech to-hand and the expertise to turn it into a championship shot-taker.
