I spent two days on an island with Apple’s camera guru. This is what I learnt
From outback Queensland to Silicon Valley genius: meet the whiz making iPhone cameras so smart they automatically fit friends into selfies. HIS TIPS AND TRICKS
Spend two days with the former Queensland farm boy who helped create the magic behind Apple’s latest iPhone cameras and you can’t help feel inspired.
Jon McCormack, who originally hails from sheep, cattle and wheat farm in Surat, 320km west of Toowoomba, leads a team of maths whizzes behind the computational photography which drives the incredible pictures and videos coming out of the latest iPhone 17 range.
This year, the biggest changes have been the new front-facing camera as well as the eight times zoom on the iPhone 17 Pro models.
While Anthony Albanese and his wife Jodie Haydon enjoyed a luxurious honeymoon on Kangaroo Island in South Australia, we joined content creators, bloggers, vloggers, videographers and photographers to learn about the latest iPhone 17 Pro camera.
We were in our element, surrounded by koalas, kangaroos and wallabies, as well as the incredible coastal vistas, white sandy beaches, rock formations, dense bushland and caves.
While the University of Queensland Bachelor of Computer Science honours graduate could talk for hours about the trillions of processes behind each photo or video captured on an iPhone, he doesn’t.
Instead he focuses on the reason the camera is so important to people.
Most importantly, it’s a tool to capture people’s most precious moments.
500 BILLION REASONS FOR A BETTER FRONT CAMERA
“We take a very human centric approach to cameras,’’ he says as he explains the importance of the new self-facing cameras.
“The new front camera gives people a new way of thinking about taking front camera selfies.
“We took this staggering number of selfies on iPhone last year: 500 billion selfies.
“So in case people are wondering if selfies are a fad, they’re not, ” the vice president, camera and photos software at Apple says.
The 18 megapixel square sensor allows vertical or horizontal shooting without rotating the phone, as well as better lowlight performance and incredible video stabilisation, as we discovered while testing it on a sand buggy ride through Little Sahara.
The changes to the selfie camera, using machine learning, mean that if you are taking a selfie with a friend and others jump into the shot, it will automatically adjust to fit them in.
The changes also make the latest iPhone a more powerful tool for content creators doing ‘walk and talking’ video shoots.
With action mode and dual capture enabled, videos are super smooth, largely doing away with the need for devices like gimbals or huge rigs for more serious filmmaking.
GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR NEW PHONE
Working with a team of maths whizzes, McCormack says he sees his job as both a privilege and a responsibility.
While some people love to be play around with settings, filters and styles, he knows most people just want a camera that will capture the moment with authenticity.
“Getting skin tone right in various lighting conditions is very, very hard.
“We, pretty quietly, about six years ago, just started chipping away at that.
“The amount of research and math, and … PhDs have gone into our work on this is phenomenal, and it’s actually not something we spend a whole lot of time talking about, because we just see it as a fundamental value.”
After being a photographer ‘seriously for probably 40 years’, McCormack says he has an understanding of what photographers are looking for but is always listening to feedback and watching how people use their iPhones.
On our two days of shooting, covering more than 500km, the thing I notice about McCormack is how many photos he takes, particularly in settings such as the Kelly Hill Caves where the light is continually changing.
One of the biggest achievements in this year’s iPhone 17 Pro has been an eight times zoom which allows people to capture portraits and objects in distance as well as most DSLR cameras.
As we stand under eucalypt gum trees with the light coming in behind a koala’s fluffy ears, the zoom means we can capture an almost full frame shot of the Aussie icon in all its glory.
Shooting video brings the shot in even tighter while action mode makes it even better, something we appreciate even more while capturing sea lions much further away in Seal Bay.
Travelling to Admirals Arch and the Remarkable Rocks, where I visited with my grandparents as a kid, I’m reminded of a handful of photos they probably took on that trip.
But having a camera that can shoot from 0.5 to eight times means you can capture the vastness of the landscape against the southern sky right down to the light bouncing off the orange textures of the rocks at full zoom or the incredible flowers near the ocean.
McCormack says the camera technology in a iPhone will continue to get better but the focus will remain not on adding ‘cool’ new features but ones that ‘allow people to have a genuinely better experience documenting and enriching their lives’.
PHONE HAS CREATED ‘NEW INDUSTRY’
McCormack is particularly excited about the ‘entire industry’ of content creators and online businesses being powered by the iPhone.
“Anybody can use this and become a creative, because the learning curve is so much quicker.
“You think about kind of 20 or 30 years ago, to be a photographer, you needed money for the gear. You needed money for film, you needed money and time for an education, and so folks like this, a lot of them wouldn’t have had a chance to do that.
‘So, it does give voice to a lot more people.
DON’T FAKE THE FAMILY HOLIDAY PICS
While the new technology, combined with the explosion of generative AI, has created the potential for a deep fake world, McCormack says Apple remains committed to authenticity.
While he has no problem with people getting creative for art or content creation for clients, he believes a family photograph as a record of history, should be real, though editing out an uncle ‘rabbiting on’ at a birthday party using audio tools on the phone is fine.
“If we make it a practice to just start modifying your history and calling it real, I think there’s something that really cheapens your human experience about that.
“If you’re on vacation with your family, and it was kind of a dark and cloudy day, and stuff like that, then all of a sudden, you’re just like, well here’s the blue sky version of it.
“You know that’s fake. The kids know that’s fake, and you look back at that in 30 years, you’re just like … I thought we got rained out on that day. What’s going on here?”
SO WHAT’S NEXT FOR iPHONE CAMERAS?
McCormack says it will be about making the camera technology easier to use, genuinely more useful, while improving image and video quality even further, catering for a future which will include spatial photos designed for immersive viewing on products such as Apple Vision Pro.
Ultimately, he says, it’s about allowing people to spend more time enjoying the moment they are in and less time having to think about how to capture it.
* The writer travelled to Kangaroo Island as a guest of Apple Australia.
Originally published as I spent two days on an island with Apple’s camera guru. This is what I learnt
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