But, there are edge cases where a cellphone camera just doesn't work very well. Capturing motion (sports, kids), low-light (bars, concerts, indoor sports), telephoto (birds and animals), and macro (100% scale, insects, flowers, some product photography).
Of course, the best camera is the one you have with you. And cellphone cameras mean that we always have a camera in our pocket or purse. But, I still bring 1-2 camera bodies and 2-4 lenses on most vacations.
The value of a good phone-camera is that you most always have it with you.
A picture is only as good as the thing it is a picture of.
And this was in 2012, when mobile phones had terrible cameras, mind you!
Of course, resolution and noise are distracting when you print big, but she was trying to judge us for our eyes and hands, rather than for our cameras and mastery over their settings. They’re orthogonal if the observer wants them to be.
For a bad photographer, a good camera makes a huge difference. It has focal length/bokeh, dynamic range, shutter speed, and more to "get" a good shot that a phonecam can't.
Once you've learned the basics, though, the tech starts to matter a lot and the limitations of that phone, or that disposable camera or polaroid, starts to interfere with the things you know you want to capture and how you want it to look, but simply can't.
You still had to be able to write to create good content. That never changed.
Now anyone can squeeze out polished crap at the touch of a button because the technology makes it simple to produce something that appears sort of like something that used to take experts a lot of work. It still takes experts a lot of work to produce something of quality. The rest of us just produce a lot.
You can start around 18 minutes in.
It's the edge cases where a top of the line camera/lens can become necessary. I've had church ceremonies where I've had to be at 6400 ISO at f/1.4. There are times where you need to work quickly and don't have time to get a perfect exposure, so having extra latitude in post production is key. There are also performance issues such as the ability to keep focus on a moving or dark target.
I'm primarily a photojournalist wedding photographer and I end up taking ~6000 pictures for a 10 hour wedding, and that'll get winnowed down to 1000 or less. The amounts are all over the place but that ratio is roughly what I've heard from other photographers. Don't feel bad about bad photos; the primary advantage to digital is that we can do that without wasting film.
For example, my mother would complain about my travel photos that didn't contain people, or would look for things like whether the people looked happy. She couldn't care less about the rule of thirds, bokeh or dramatic lighting.
Don't get me wrong, artistry and craft matter, but I think they would be considered "enhancements". Most people would gladly accept a poorly composed image of a loved one or special moment because they value the memory over other attributes.
I spent 25 years telling people to "get out of my photos" in landscapes. Then something clicked in 2008 and I became all about people (to the point of running a Wedding/Event/Portrait photography business for a decade or so:).
I'll still take landscape photos, and I enjoy them, and some of them are decent... but I still get most excited when I capture a particular expression on a person these days. Go figure!
Heh, this is one thing I regret about my past photos — I have plenty of travel photos, but very few with myself in them.
And while I know my composition and lighting fundamentals, my photos will rarely be on par with someone with the luxury to wait for the right moment, or something from a postcard or the best of Flickr or 500px.
Who knows if that will change in 20 or 30 years.
What you bring to the scene is you and your relationships with the people and things there. That's your marginal advantage from your photos.
You'll get better photos by taking candids than posing portraits everywhere though.
There are some cultures that prefer the posed portraits over candids.
Anything you work on in drawing & painting carries over to photography near 100% as well.
And there are plenty of famous photographers who have been great musicians as well who would argue that music & photographic composition are somehow related as well.
Thanks for sharing your other comments, btw.
In short, there are images that I used to be really proud of that now are honestly a bit torturous to look through.
Photography courses teach basic composition skills that you have to know -- that is, if you follow them blindly you'll get decent and non-boring photos -- and then you can develop your style by selectively subverting them. I suppose getting your own style is about breaking the rules to get more "interesting" and unique photos.
The most annoying thing is using a prime lens or low light photos and people see you have a camera and get in a line to pose, and you're like, I... can't zoom out and can't get you all in focus.
At a certain point, I stopped looking to new gear (as it pertains to music) and started focusing on trying to push the boundaries of what I had. As it turns out, I wasn't anywhere near close to pushing what I had to its limits, which proved I should just focus on technique and craftsmanship. Since then, I've grown a lot more.
I also only shared on social media photos that were taken with my DSLR or whatever I was carrying at the time. I received a ton of positive feedback on the quality of the photos, with everyone commenting on the fact I must have a nice camera, asking what camera I used, etc.
Last year, after playing around with an iPhone 10, I made a conscious decision to leave my camera at home for most occasions, and do the best I could with just my phone. The quality was such that I didn't feel I was losing out on much by not using a fancy camera.
Since then 99% of what I post on social media has been shot with my iPhone. And yet, I still, constantly, have people telling me "you must have a nice camera, what kind is it?" They sometimes refuse to believe me when I say it was my phone.
There's no real secret to it, I don't think. I spend a lot of time considering framing, perspective, lighting. I also still post-process in Lightroom (on my phone) most photos I post. Just simple things like some straightening/cropping, maybe bumping the contrast and clarity a bit.
I've come to believe there are really only two things you need a nice camera (or more accurately, lenses) for: 1) nice background separation with a shallow DOF. The iPhone portrait mode is still pretty mediocre, and finicky to use. And 2) the changes in perspective different focal lengths can give you. Compression with a telephoto can give some really nice effects, and you can't beat the wide open sweep of a wide angle.
The fact my iPhone now has 14mm, 26mm, and 52mm focal lengths makes that last point even more irrelevant. And it's so awesome I can quickly toggle through them, rather than swapping lenses or carrying a heavy zoom lens.
Of course phone camera sensors haven't caught up yet with "real" cameras. If you're doing serious night shooting a big sensor still can't be beat. But frankly I'm amazed at just how well my phone does do in low light (just don't pixel peep on a large screen).
Also as Scalzi notes, the phone's wide-angle lens is rarely the right choice for a lot of good shots, and yet it's all that's available unless I wanna start carrying unwieldy accessories all the time.
I got my first DSLR in 2006. When I got a new one a few years later, my choice was mostly about what the new camera made _easier_. Because the old camera could do almost everything I wanted to do.
So the new camera had knobs and buttons for things that I had to do in menus on the old one. And a couple of automatic things that I had to do manually on the old one. (Shooting brackets!)
Just viewing lots of photos from lots of different people doesn't tell you the story of what you can do with the tech you're looking at: you really need to look at what individual people are able to get out of them, and cell phone cameras still drastically lose out there, even the ones with "multiple cameras". There are some elementary things that the effectively-pinhole-cameras on a phone just can't do that are trivial with a physically manipulable lens.
Most of the pictures I take are most definitely not art, just an attempt at snapshotting now.
Yes, the main point is the diminishing artistic returns from more expensive gear.
It feels like that's the space Nikon, Canon, and the other big camera companies should be working on. Is there any innovation coming out of the camera companies?
The software side...not so much. The amount of customization in cameras isn't up to par. For instance, Nikon DSLRs have an image quality button. That's a button that I never want to hit, as it can change the quality from RAW to 'Basic JPEG.' The only way you'll notice that happened is if you see the amount of images you can fit on your card jump up. There's no way to disable it, and on the D750/D610 it's right next to the damned primary ISO button, and they even swapped places between those two cameras.
Fuji has some good film emulation postprocessing for their jpegs. I will say though that a lot of the postprocessing that's done on cell phones is to make up for their limited capabilities. I actually have everything turned off on my DSLRs, as the postprocessing effects the jpeg that's built in to the RAW file. That means what you see on the back on the camera isn't necessarily what you took.
There isn't much of a point in having the camera itself try to do the processing as it'll never be able to outcompete the capabilities (both hardware and software-wise) possible in the desktop software.
Are you saying you can carry a black sheet with you everywhere or that the DSLR can replace the background dynamically when you shoot?
My whole point in this thread was that nobody in the big body camera world seems to be doing much with computation or multiple sensors. I think it's astonishing what Apple, Google, and Sony have done with small lenses and sensors and would be interested to see what they could do with big lenses and sensors.
Equipment may pose constraints on what you can feasibly do (though fewer than people think).
How and what you then do within these constraints is largely up to you.
Will AI increasingly get better and better framing, colours, processing, etc? Most definitely. For the immediate future though, the emotion and ideas of talented, innovative photographers will still stand above.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7ECB90D96DF59DE5
But then again, I have also found that a lot of people who are into photography will draw a negative impression of a person's knowledge/skill based on that person's gear (sensor size, brand preference, lens choices).
At the end of the day, you're arguing about something that you want to "get out of your way" as much as possible. All that time you spend arguing, you could spend programming or learning.
Imagine if you were sitting next to a reincarnation of Ken Thompson at a local coffee shop... who cares if he's typing into a surface pro? The writing and the writer are the important things. In photography, it's the shooter, the subject, and the choice of frame. Gear-ogling is fun to geek over, but past a certain low threshold, it's a waste of everyone's time.
I had a friend who got a chance of a lifetime to go on a photography trip to Mongolia with a pro who had worked for Nat Geo. The dude had some seriously impressive gear. He was kind enough to lend some of it to my friend, who loves to geek out over these things, while the pro used more enthusiast-accessible glass. Shiny gear is nice, but it's best thought of as a set of interchangeable tools.
You can substitute anything in the place of "laptops" - programming languages, methodologies, coffee, barbecue sauce, diets, exercise etc.
As In "oh, I like this tree, lets snapshot it to put on social media" vs. really thinking about how to capture this moment on a 2D surface. Motif, framing, lights and shadow, flow of lines, fore-, middle-, and background, etc. (As I said, I don't know about photography but those seem to be things you want to care about).
I reckon, the difference of what camera you use is much more about the choices they allow you to make than some superiority in technical specs. The latter is to squeeze out the last few percent or as related to production pipeline e.g. printing on billboards.
I think especially we people in tech, who can often more easily afford it, tend to jump to getting more sophisticated, expensive gear, be that photography, music, painting, etc. expecting better results, forgetting that it's all pretty worthless, if you don't get the fundamental artistry and techniques right first.