Modern phones get you 90% there. The bokeh quality apparently wasn't a priority until very recently. For indoor applications, a Huawei P20 Pro with artificial b

Modern phones get you 90% there. The bokeh quality apparently wasn't a priority until very recently. For indoor applications, a Huawei P20 Pro with artificial bokeh and good onboard image processing beats my APS-C-format Sony camera with an F/1.4 lens most of the time — not even counting cases when the depth of field of said F/1.4 is too shallow! No way can that mobile thing compete with a good lens in good lighting though. But soon that won't be because camera hardware isn't competitive; rather, the phone's computational photography pipeline and lack of dedicated controls wouldn't allow enough flexibility in shooting techniques. Again, the mobile phone manufacturers are just starting advancing to higher-end photography — the science and computing power is basically there, you can do a lot with deep learning combined with real understanding of image formation and photography. I wouldn't call myself anything serious as a photographer; OTOH some serious photographers whom I follow start turning more into 3D artists or videographers. Photography as a profession seems to be in a crisis: not that it's not needed, it's that many adjacent things (3D, video, design, marketing) are also needed, not unlike in programming: there's almost no such thing as a senior (e.g.) Python developer, there are senior Web, Data, etc. developers which primarily use Python along with other tools (JS, sql, etc).