Macro photography is more popular than we expected – more than half of the voters in last week’s poll expressed interest in it, although only some of them have phones that are actually good at shooting macro photos.
As we noted in that post, it’s still very common for ultra wide camera modules to have fixed focus lenses. Manufacturers seem happy to put a basic 2MP macro module on most phones rather than paying for a pricier lens on the ultra wide.
Check out the poll results, the number of people who are interested in macro photography but don’t have the right phone for it is higher than the number of people who aren’t interested in this style of photography at all. This seems like a missed opportunity for manufacturers.
We had a follow-up question – which camera should be responsible for macro mode? Most phones either have a dedicated module or use their ultra wide camera. But some use their telephoto lenses instead.
This has an advantage of staying at a distance. As some commenters point out, sometimes it’s just not possible to shove your phone a couple of centimeters away from the subject.
Even so, most people believe that the ultra wide is the right camera for the job. There were some proponents of dedicated macro lenses, but the majority thinks that one of the other modules should pull double duty.
Macro photography is a genre that proved to be surprisingly popular – it adds variety by letting people capture images that normal cameras can’t. Now it’s up to manufacturers to make autofocus a standard feature on ultra wide cameras.
