4 ms·

And yet the photos I take on my 7 year old mirror-less camera look eons better than anything I take on my iPhone?

• toomuchtodo 7y ago
  The best camera is the one you have with you, and everyone usually has their smartphone with them.
  • jrockway 7y ago
    That is an expression, but there have been a lot of good photographs I've seen where I only have my phone. I take it and think "this does not do the scene justice, it looks like crap."
    • kenhwang 7y ago
      I know that feeling. So many times I come across a great scene, snap a photo with my phone, and instantly regret not bringing my DSLR with me.
    • freetime2 7y ago
      In my case my favorite landscape photo that I’ve ever taken was shot with a smartphone at sunset. I would love to print it and hang it on my wall, but there’s just not enough detail for a large print. I’m glad that my smartphone performed as well as it did, but wish I had brought a more substantial camera on that trip.
• jrockway 7y ago
  I feel the same way. I keep seeing these amazing iPhone pictures in giant subway ads and on blogs like this... but never get similar results myself. To some extent, I fear that "the eye" of the public has simply forgotten what sort of photographs are possible, and are happy with snapshots taken in perfect conditions, which do look OK on phone cameras. Remember the old architectural style with tilt-shift lenses, where tall things would imposingly loom over you with perfectly parallel lines? You can remove the "distortion" from tiling your camera up in software, but it tends to look pretty terrible compared to a camera on a tripod that is perfectly level and is just taking the image from the bottom of the image circle. Remember how it's nighttime half the time, but you never see good pictures taken at night? Stars exist, waves bend into glass, and the moon can glow over your mountains and valleys. But not if you're holding your camera in your hand and have a fingerprint on the lens. So we don't see those pictures anymore. Even product photos in ads look pretty bad a lot of the time. You can get a white table and take a snapshot with your cell phone, but it looks like you did. Maybe it doesn't matter, though. Ultimately, the problem the camera industry has is that very few people need to take perfect pictures in tough conditions. Fine art, wildlife, sports... phone cameras just don't yield as good of results as a larger camera. But not many people are taking that kind of picture. They just want to say "hey friends, I went to this place, look at it" or "look at my friend here". And a phone camera is great for that. It's the perfect balance; it takes up 0 space (since you were carrying a phone anyway), and the image quality is good enough. Smaller dedicated cameras (like an RX100) just don't provide much of a leap in quality.
  • macintux 7y ago
    > ...So we don't see those pictures anymore. I think you’re mistaken. The people who would take stunning photographs with any equipment available to them, still do so. It’s just that there are nearly infinitely more photographs floating around because the tools have been democratized, and thus it’s harder to find the spectacular ones.
    • jrockway 7y ago
      What I meant to say is that Apple cherry-picks one photograph in perfect conditions, people think "wow, what a great camera, must buy!" and then totally miss the opportunity to photograph in non-perfect situations without realizing what they're missing. If I were Sony or Nikon or Canon, I would buy the subway ad next to Apple's and show a stunning night shot as their example. In comparison, the iPhone camera might not look like such a must have. (Especially in a world where "dark mode" and the color blue are so popular, I think it could work.)
      • FireBeyond 7y ago
        Hell, Apple was busted a few years ago calling a DSLR image an iPhone picture, when someone looked at the EXIF data.
        • macintux 7y ago
          Huawei and Samsung (at least twice) have been caught doing that. I’d need a citation to believe Apple has done so.
• berkut 7y ago
  Yep. Especially on a big screen, where jpegs out of the iPhone (and other brand phones) often look like water colour paintings due to the aggressive denoising that is done, even in bright sunlight where the ISO should be fairly low for the phone. RAW can be done on phones (I use it on my iPhone), but the result seems to be extremely noisy (but at least you get the detail, which generally gets lost in jpegs from the built-in Camera app).
• jdgoesmarching 7y ago
  Nobody smart is arguing phones take better pics, but they’re a hell of a lot closer than they’ve ever been and camera manufacturers have done little to make themselves more compelling.
• mamp 7y ago
  If that's the case you're not using all the features of your phone correctly — at least the iPhone 11. I was shooting Canon for about 12 years and now have a Sony A7rIII because of it's amazing eye-autofocus, and a heap of lenses. With the DSLR I take the picture, download it to the computer and then play with it on Capture One, often using the great smart masking feature to add some punch to people's faces vs background stuff. Now on the iPhone 11 range I shoot in portrait mode, which now also works with the 26mm lens (previously just the 52mm). Basically the portrait mode uses semantic segmentation to identify people and clothes. I then use iOS 13's picture editing to get the look right on the picture (usually a little too yellow), add vignette, etc. and then use the portrait lighting to brighten people. There is a huge difference in the before/after of the photos, and they look really impressive. No manual masking, no delays. Ok, so I can notice the funky bokeh effects sometimes, and it's not on par with the Sony + 35mm f1.4 , or even the 35mm f1.8, but the ease of getting impressive shots is amazing if you know how to process them.
  • theOneTrueOld 7y ago
    The eye focus on the a7iii is amazing. There is no way I would capture in focus images of children without it. It's so fast and so accurate.