This morning I decided to go for a fall hike, and selected the Indian Springs Trail, a 2.2-mile woodland loop at Munroe Falls Metropark in Summit County. I took along my new iPhone 18 Pro to check out some of the new camera features on Apple’s latest iPhone model.
As I turned into the Munroe Falls Metropark entrance road, I noticed several young white-tailed deer browsing in the pine woods near the road. I rolled down the front passenger window in my RAV4 and took the photo above using the 8X telephoto setting on my iPhone 18 Pro.
More woodland mushroom species are usually found in summer than any other season, but for sheer numbers it’s hard to beat Honey Mushrooms, which include several species in the Armillaria genus that fruit in the fall. Near some large tulip trees along the Indian Springs Trail, a fallen tree trunk and log were covered with thousands of fruiting Brown Honey Mushrooms, Armillaria gallica. All honey mushrooms are edible, but they must be thoroughly cooked or digestive problems may occur. I used the 2X (48mm equivalent) setting on the iPhone 18 Pro’s main camera, which includes a mechanical aperture that can be adjusted by the user to control depth-of-field. The f1.48 setting rendered all the mushrooms tack-sharp in this composition.
For this close-up of a smaller group of the Honey Mushrooms, I used Portrait Mode, which allowed me to set the Depth at f/13 to provide additional depth-of-field in the image.
Further along the trail, the sawn surface of a fallen tree trunk displayed the downward pointing spines of a Bear’s Tooth fungus, which is another popular fall edible mushroom. I used the 4X telephoto camera on the iPhone 18 Pro to compose a portrait of this attractive white mushroom.
On the final section of my hike I found a small but attractive Sulphur Shelf mushroom growing on a fallen tree.
Since the ultra-wide, wide, and telephoto cameras and sensors are essentially identical on the iPhone 17 Pro and 18 Pro, I don’t feel that the addition of mechanical aperture settings on the iPhone 18 Pro alone is enough to justify the upgrade. For the most part, I prefer to use Portrait Mode in Photo Mode when using the main (wide) camera, and adjusting the point of focus and depth-of-field using the depth maps and computational photography techniques provided in Portrait Mode and the iPhone editor. On the other hand, if you are currently using an iPhone 14 Pro or earlier iPhone model the higher-resolution ultra-wide and telephoto cameras available on the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro are a major improvement and an upgrade is definitely worthwhile.
The built-in photo editors on the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro have many excellent features, but I prefer to download my iPhone photos to my Dell Windows 11 workstation and add them to my Adobe Lightroom catalog. I carry out most of my post-processing in Lightroom, but also use Photoshop for some operations, including noise reduction and image sharpening, which I carry out using the recently added Topaz AI Noise Reduction and AI sharpening filters.