2021-06-17 The Smartphone Camera
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I just finished reading The Smartphone vs The Camera Industry by
Nasim Mansurov, on Photography Life. He argues that the camera
industry is done for, and that photography is moving to smartphones.
It’s a good read and it matches my experience.
I bought a new camera back in 2013, with a 17mm lens. It took
gorgeous landscape pictures and pretty good portraits. I loved it!
However, when I switched from the iPhone 6S to the iPhone 11 back in
2019, I realised that the pictures this new phone was taking were
better. They weren’t much better, but they were still better. Dramatic
skies, glowing fields, flower closeups, they all looked great.
Portraits were pretty good. Zoom was useless, but my “real” camera
didn’t have a zoom at all.
* Olympus PEN E-PL5, on Wikipedia
That changed in 2017 when I bought a 75-300mm lens. Now I had a zoom
but I ended up never using it. My hands are too shaky and I wasn’t
bringing a tripod along; birds in flight were far off and hard to
track and focus; other animals were hard to see; distant mountains
were disappearing in a blueish haze. I wasn’t using it much. I used it
at the zoo. The animals were close, and I have enough time to fiddle
with the settings and the focus.
Two years later, however, it really paid off. We went to the Galápagos
; the animals here are not afraid of humans so you can see them up
close. And if they are close, and don’t move, and I have a zoom, then
I can take wonderful portrait of these animals. Check out the
Galápagos albums. Those marine iguanas… 😍
Now that I’m back in Switzerland, though, I once again have little use
for the 75-300mm lens.
This year, I started taking a lot of pictures of flowers using my
iPhone 11. So beautiful! I loved those details. I wondered: would the
pictures be even more glorious if I had a macro lens? I bought a 35mm
macro lens and gave it a try. And it’s true. You can get a little bit
closer. The depth of field is very small. So small in fact, that I
often wonder whether it would be better if I were using a different
lens and just cropped the image. Or used the smartphone. Or bought a
new camera with multi-focus image fusion.
* Multi-focus image fusion, on Wikipedia
See where this is going? It’s what Mansurov means when he talks about
the “big camera complexity problem”. If you just use a good smartphone
camera, your landscapes and your portraits will be excellent, your
closeups will be good enough… and you probably don’t need a zoom
unless you’re going to the zoo. At least that’s my take by now.
Practically all the pictures I share on Mastodon (@kensanata) are
made with the smartphone. It takes too much time to wait until they’re
transferred to the laptop, processed there, and sent to the phone. The
immediacy of being somewhere, taking pictures, and posting about the
experience is lost.
#Camera
Comments
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JTR (AKA @jrss ) here. You’ve touch a topic close to my heart 🙂
Oddly, with me, it was the other way around. When I realized I was
looking at phone specs because of the camera, I decided to simply just
get a camera (
https://helpdeskheadesk.net/help-desk-head-desk/2019-11-06/).
I got a lot of good things from getting that camera, which is right
now behind me in my “photography” bag:
for one, I swallowed article after article (and YouTube vid after
another) about photography and camera. I’ve learned a great deal about
exposure, ISO, aperture, compositions. I’ve also discovered to frame
my photography style a bit further, and from there learn and improve
more with what I do. Some of the photos I’m proud of taken with the
camera are at
https://helpdeskheadesk.net/help-desk-head-desk/20200201/ (by the
way, that bird picture is with a 300mm zoom camera I took with me to a
local park once. I took several, this came out good, the camera is
doing a good job canceling out my shaky hand if I use high shutter
speed - no tripod)
Obviously you (and the original article) make excellent points. Almost
every single time I pass something “cool,” I don’t have my camera with
me. When I bought the camera, I was aiming for a small-frame (hence,
mirrorless) camera that I could always carry with me, but that’s
simply not practical, especially with the lenses and the equipment.
Another thing is the apps (I use Snapspeed mostly) and the ability to
post to Instagram and similar (even to Mastodon!) withing seconds,
have it look amazing and get a comments, where with the camera you’re
a week behind - exactly because of the process described. I have
Darktable (if you don’t have it I highly recommend you try it as one
FOSS enthusiast to another) and Gimp and I know my way enough around
both, but Snapspeed is home to me. I’ve been using it for years.
But there is something special about a camera, and it’s not the camera
itself. It’s the mindset. When I take my camera with me and go to the
park, I tap into the creative side of my mind. I actually don’t want
to look at my phone at all. On a vacation recently, I walked down a
street that would normally take me 20 minutes or so to walk down on
and instead I walked for almost 2 hours, looking at buildings and
windows from different angles. To the passerby, I probably looked like
a weird person: staring from this angle, then from that angle. I
didn’t care, I snapped away. The quality wasn’t necessarily in the
photos (some came great though), but in the mindset. It was me and my
camera. I was there to take photos. It was also obvious to others what
I was doing and they kind of nodded and moved out of the way.
Sure, you can’t do this every time. Actually you can’t do this almost
at all, since you need to plan it and have the equipment with you. But
I’d argue that these are the moments that teach you about photography
and your own creative style. They fill you with additional inspiration
you wouldn’t get just from holding your phone, because your phone will
keep chatting back at you. The phone is good to take one photo,
perhaps three, and move on. The camera is like being sucked into
another dimension. I don’t know if this makes sense at all.
Anyway, I ranted long enough. Thanks for posting this, and giving me
the chance to focus my mental lens 😉
– 2021-06-20 11:35 UTC
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I definitely agree with the eye of a photographer changing the
experience. It’s like writing as learning: taking pictures puts us in
a particular frame of mind when looking at things; it changes
everything. Structure, colors, subjects, lines, horizon, colors, the
sky, reflections – everything is interesting and different if you are
thinking about taking pictures.
I do feel that this is possible while carrying around a smartphone but
maybe years of owning a camera have enabled me to do this? Then again,
I do think that a generation raised on Instagram must have an eye for
photography.
Just yesterday we went on a walk that was supposed to last two hours
and we took three and a half hours. Taking pictures, sometimes with
the phone, sometimes with camera and the macro lens, looking up
flowers, reading up on local things, reading the plaques. If I have
picture taking in mind, the distinction between camera and phone fades
away, for me.
Anyway, I’m not about to throw my camera and it’s three lenses away
just yet. 😁
– Alex 2021-06-20 13:43 UTC
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nytpu: «personally love my “real” cameras, but maybe it’s because I
often shoot on film, so carrying around a digital camera occasionally
isn’t much different.»
Szczeżuja: “In 2017 for my holidays I take only a mobile phone for
taking photos.”
– Alex 2021-07-03 06:09 UTC
