Shot on Galaxy S10+ Pro mode: Australian F1 GP Tesla road trip - Part 1

I am lucky enough to be on a road trip to the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix in Australia. Another point of interest is that not only am I equipped with the Galaxy S10+, I am headed down from my home city of Sydney to Melbourne (a roughly 1,000 km drive) in my brother’s Tesla Model S. It is the entry-level model with a single electric motor and a range limited to 380 km. As he lives right in the city, he doesn’t really need a model with a longer range, so it was interesting to see how the trip unfolded.

Tesla has installed multiple supercharging locations along the east coast of Australia space roughly 200 km apart to help facilitate the uptake of its electric-only cars in the local market. When my brother plotted our trip to Melbourne, the onboard computer automatically located and planned the optimal number of charging stops and locations for the trip. The information on the dash clearly shows how much battery will be left in the vehicle by the time we reach each stop and how long we should stay connected to the charger — typically, this worked out to around 20 minutes per stop. It was a great opportunity to recharge ourselves, as it turned out, letting us stretch our legs, get refreshments and stay more alert for the long commute.

One of the highlights of the trip from Sydney to Melbourne is that not only is dual-carriage all the way, it also provided us with an opportunity to test Tesla’s auto-pilot feature. This pretty much works as advertised as the roads are well line-marked and certainly helped to take some of the fatigue out of the trip. The only downside is that you do need a pretty firm grip on the steering wheel, otherwise it will potentially disconnect the system. It is a necessary safety feature, however, as it isn’t fool-proof yet. As we know, there have been horror stories of drivers involved in fatal crashes before Tesla installed this fail-safe system.

Another highlight of the trip, as you can see from the photos, is that the Australian landscape between Sydney and Melbourne is quite stunning, with incredible scenery which gave me a great opportunity to test out the Galaxy S10+ camera in Pro mode. Pro mode allows you to shoot in Auto Focus mode, which I used most of the time, while also giving you the opportunity to control the ISO, aperture, shutter speed, color temperature, tint, contrast, saturation, highlight, shadow, manually focus, white balance and exposure. It also lets you save photos in RAW and HEIF in addition to JPEG. (Note that none of the photos included here have been edited in any way - you see them exactly as they were captured.)

Over the course of the journey down to Melbourne, which took around 12 hours including stops to charge the Model S, the lighting changed. As we left Sydney at around 6 am and arrived at around 6 pm and then went out for dinner on the town, you can see the way the Galaxy S10+ handles all of these situations with aplomb. It may lack some of the depth of detail of an iPhone XS or the low-light clarity of the Pixel 3, but it is a great all-round camera. I plan to play around with these functions a little more over the next couple of days at the Melbourne Albert Park street circuit for Part 2 of this story.

I've included a select few pics below, with the rest at this link: photos.app.goo.gl/DDet4MCMvK34YtpT9