The iPhone 5s does an admirable job capturing outdoor sports images.

Let’s up the ante and go indoors where light is precious and parent photographer walk around space is rather limited.

Once again, the excellent Canon zoom with the occasional extender pleases the eye with images such as this cross court capture:

Tap to view a larger version.

I augmented the iPhone 5s camera’s standard focal length with the slick iPro 2 telephoto lens (note the FAQ on iPro 2 and the iPhone 5s and 5c).

The images below were captured using the built-in camera app. I pinched to digitally zoom, tapped on a tennis player to focus and used the 5s’s 10 frames per second “burst mode” to capture* a series of images, some of which were interesting:

What about video?

I captured a brief “slow mo” video scene, again with the iPro 2x telephoto lens (exporting slow mo video is presently non trivial):

iPhone 5s: Tennis slo mo from Jim Zellmer on Vimeo.

The results were better than expected and superior to some of the nearby point & shoot and entry level cameras.

Apple’s powerful “system on a chip” expertise, user experience ethos, app ecosystem and developer community has created a photo tsunami, one that is engulfing the traditional players. The Canon & Nikons of the world are operating at a much, much slower pace (OODA).

Shooting with my Canon dslr today, I thought back to the 2007 iPhone introduction when it was immediately obvious that button heavy phones were toast. The iPhone’s computer heritage and touchscreen meant that developers were no longer lashed to the phone first hardware. The phone became an app and the rest is history.

Apple and third party developers, including lens makers, will certainly continue to push the iPhone photography frontier.

* I find the lack of significant camera app shutter lag to be rather impressive, particularly when shooting action scenes.