SLRs have enormous sensors. The largest common sensor size in computer vision is 1". That's smaller than micro 4/3. APS-C and full frame are huge. Big sensor means more photons, which means less noisy images. Combine that with a big ol' lens and a good processor and you get nice well-exposed images without any effort.

People are disappointed by phone images because they take snaps indoors or in low light, and their pictures come out grainy and noisy. In the iPad Pro advert the scenes are lit so brightly that the sensitivity of the sensor is basically meaningless.

For studio photography, the lighting is more important than the camera. I once brought a pro-grade DLSR, a $400 entry-level DSLR, and a final-gen film SLR to the same shoot, and created images with all three using the same lighting setup. The difference in results wasn't immediately obvious.

Modern camera phones have good sensors, so if you drop one into an otherwise-professional studio setup, you'll get good results.

cf. https://www.diyphotography.net/samsung-used-my-dslr-photo-to...

You think? I'm amazed by the photos I get on my phone (Pixel) and that my wife takes with her iPhone. The low light performance is especially shocking.

I used to have an SLR and sometimes I think about getting a Leica just because they are beautiful, but if I'm honest my phone is a better camera than I really need.

So I appreciate the quality of mobile phone photography in such a small form factor

I think the core of the issue that I am getting at is how the average consumer spends thousands of dollars on their gear. Pixel peeping, gear talk, MTF curves, the bokeh battle, the whole culture is preoccupied with the details. And yet, they don't have anything to show for it in terms of results. To me personally, it doesn't bring joy. Joy to me is creating something incredible that is avant-garde, unique and something that gives me goosebumps. To others, amazing gear brings joy so there is something to be said about consumer spending in form of stress therapy.

The other point is that it creates an artificial barrier to newcomers where there is so much chatter about this gear and that gear.

After all, what do we do but capture fleeting moments in a living world? Looking at moments, captured, we experience the same spark, the same life, that the photographer saw. We connect, as humans. That's powerful.

The lenses, cameras, and phones that we love to obsess over are great. I love gear as much as the next person. But gear is dead, where the world around is brimming with life. And to obsess over the gear at the expense of the art waiting for us outside the window and over the hill is to lose something precious.

1: https://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1... "Taking pics is one thing, but understanding why we take them, what they mean, what they are best used for, how they effect our reality -- all of these and more are important issues of the Philosophy of Photography. One of the best authors on the subject is Susan Sontag in her book "On Photography.""

Having said that, depth of field versatility is only one tool, and often it's a hindrance rather than a help (e.g. we're trying to find the hyperfocal depth and maximize depth of field). For a wide gamut of photography realms such as landscape photography, city life, etc, it is absolutely true that a modern smartphone can compete with any SLR and create perfect results.

What the lenses do is give you more options for photo taking in situations where your phone cameras have difficulty. This is usually to do with tricky light situations. For example, having large, fast lenses for night time shooting.

If I was just shooting vanilla day time photos in well lit situations I could make extremely passable photos with any of the modern iPhones.