8 ms·

I actually think what’s happening is that it’s averaging out photography with such amazing tools in everyone’s hands, however we are seeing an outlier explosion

I actually think what’s happening is that it’s averaging out photography with such amazing tools in everyone’s hands, however we are seeing an outlier explosion of creative photography that we haven’t seen before. That said, the dopamine hit comes from taking your own shots and seeing the visual perfectness Apple creates, rarely if ever will those shots give the same effect to a viewer. So they don’t need to be photography-perfect, they just need to appeal enough to our monkey brains and monkey eyes to get that shot of dopamine to want us to take more pictures, therefore using the phone and resulting cloud storage more.

baz00 3y ago
The magic of phone cameras disappears in a moment when you get hold of a mirrorless for 5 minutes. Even a bottom end one is orders of magnitude better than the best phone camera even if it’s got a lot less megapixels.
- cooper_ganglia 3y ago
  The magic of phone cameras lies in their convenience.
- ClikeX 3y ago
  My mirrorless definitely beats my iPhone. But I have to put in more time, it’s not with me at all times and I need to transfer the images. In the end, the best camera is the one I have with me. And if I can take a pretty good portrait shot of my kid while I’m at a diner then I’m happy. To me, the memory/moment is more important than the “quality”.
- kajecounterhack 3y ago
  I love my mirrorless, but it certainly wasn't 5 minutes. The first two lenses I tried (cheap ones obviously) were pretty underwhelming. Once I got a large aperture lens, I started to really get it. Even then, so many of my photos came out dark or blurry because I hadn't learned how to pick settings or focus for different lighting conditions and subject movement speeds. Autofocus on consumer cameras is pretty trash compared to iPhone/Pixel. EyeAF my ass. These camera companies need to invest more in their software. Superzoom, night sight, subject tracking and smart autofocus should be table stakes. Auto mode on my mirrorless should at least be on par out of the box with my phone. It's sad that the pixel phones with very old Sony sensors can take better 10x pictures than mirrorless out of the box. They need to worry less about better lenses and sensors, and worry more about better onboard compute capabilities.
  - sgarland 3y ago
    Lenses make SUCH a difference. A family member asked me to shoot their wedding (no pressure, right?) and since without me it wouldn’t have happened, I agreed. I also rented some L glass for my SLRs, and holy shit was that eye-opening. Turns out that a $2000 lens is objectively better than a $300 lens, who knew? The clarity, the sharpness, the pop - everything was improved. Good glass is a bigger difference than the body.
    - kepler1 3y ago
      Can you say a bit more what you think was the factor? -- more control of depth of field / shallower DoF ability? -- faster shutter speeds? -- less chromatic aberrations? It doesn't intuitively feel like sharpness should be a factor -- even cheap kit lenses usually get that right.
      - JKCalhoun 3y ago
        (Guessing the faster glass.)
      - weebull 3y ago
        * wider f-stop * less chromatic aberration * less distortion generally * smaller circle of confusion The chromatic aberration is an important but subtle effect. Remember that lenses are multiple pieces of glass, and every interface diffracts the wavelengths of light like a prism. One of the considerations in lens design is converging all those different wavelengths of light in the same place. Not just at one point, but at every point across the image plane. Poor lenses might do the well in an area. Good lenses do it everywhere.
      - sgarland 3y ago
        Sorry, should have clarified. The lens in particular that made me rethink everything else I had was a 70-200mm f/2.8L. Zooms in particular often suffer from sharpness and chromatic aberration issues compared to a prime due to the larger number of optics. This lens did not. I’m sure a comparable prime stuck next to it would still show it up, but coming from kit zoom lenses, it was quite a shocking difference. The static aperture also helps tremendously of course, yes - nice bokeh with a tight zoom means you can easily get candid portraits that look great from anywhere in the room.
- olivermuty 3y ago
  I bought a $1200 mirrorless which was supposedly the best in class a couple of years ago. All my photos look like they were shot on a potato compared to my iphone. Not to mention that I don't walk around with that mirrorless camera in my pocket at almost all times.
  - baz00 3y ago
    I spent that and mine don't look like it's shot on a potato. Are you sure you know what you are doing? My Z50 and kit lens fits in my pocket fine.
    - olivermuty 3y ago
      Thats the whole point, I don’t know what I am doing.
      - baz00 3y ago
        Fix that. Then you have a right to complain :)
      - numpad0 3y ago
        I once asked someone with a nice piece of kit that wasn't too far from mine in cost. They said they sorted top to bottom on DxOMark list and bought one on the top and they didn't even know what a prime is. But that approach seemed to work.
      - arein2 3y ago
        put aperture, iso, focus, shutter speed on auto (if it's not a manual lens) and you will get good pictures
  - criley2 3y ago
    I spent about that on a mirrorless and my photos blow smartphones out of the water. It takes 10x longer to setup, take, and post-process and is a hassle for many reasons, but the photo quality is extremely noticeably better.
  - 3y ago
- cyberax 3y ago
  Ehh, no. My typical test is to take a photo of the full moon. It works acceptably well on an iPhone (or Android). My recent Pixel phone even adjusts the brightness automatically. Sure, the lens is pretty wide-angle, so the pictures don't have many details. I had to fiddle around for 20 minutes with settings on my Sony Alpha camera, eventually using manual focus and manual exposure. The pictures are, of course, better because of the lens and the full-frame sensor. But the user experience is just sad. So I often just don't bother to take my camera with me on my trips anymore. Also, a note to camera makers: USE ANDROID INSTEAD OF YOUR CRAPPY HOME-GROWN SHITWARE. Add 5G, normal WiFi, GPS, Play Store, a good touchscreen. You'll have an instant hit.
  - baz00 3y ago
    No. That's a hill I'll die on. Ass end Nikon Z50, 250mm kit lens, hand held, no setup really other than shutter priority ... https://imgur.com/edCyNjV https://imgur.com/edCyNjV (very heavy crop!) And a Pixel 6a mutilating a shot: https://imgur.com/290gXkU https://imgur.com/290gXkU I do not want android on a phone. I don't want to update or reboot it. I want to turn it on, use it and turn it off again. And I don't want someone substituting pictures of the moon for stuff online (hey Samsung!)
    - criley2 3y ago
      Great example of the primary difference here. I've said that the photos out of my mirrorless (also Z50, great camera) are true photographs in the sense that they capture light and show it to me. My smartphone however does not create photos, it creates digital art based on the scene. Your Pixel image is a perfect example of how algorithms (now called "AI") re-paint a scene in a way that resembles reality when zoomed out. Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes.
      - kajecounterhack 3y ago
        > Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes. Calm down, it's not that bad. Take for example night sight or astrophotography; it's using ML to intelligently stitch together light across time because available light in one moment is not enough to capture anything intelligible. Your end result is an accurate representation of what your eyes see (e.g. my own face in a nighttime selfie) and what is sitting there in the sky (the stars). You can call that repainting, but I disagree, it's more information aggregation over the temporal dimension. Super resolution is similar, using shakes in your hand to gather higher resolution than you can accomplish with a single frame of data from your low res sensor grid. 2-3x digital zoom with super res technology is actually getting more information and more like optical zoom. It's not just cropping+interpolating. Now...portrait mode. That's clearly just post-processing. But also...does blurring the background using lens focus have any additional merit vs doing it in post (besides your "purity"-driven feelings about it)? At the end of the day, I want my mirrorless to do more than be a dumb light capture machine. I spent $X thousand+ for a great lens and sensor, so I want to maximize. It should do more to compensate automatically for bad lighting, motion blur, etc. It should try harder to understand what I want to focus on. As a photographer, I should get to think more about what photo I want taken and think less about what steps I need to take to accomplish that. My iPhone typically does a better job of this than my $X000 mirrorless. So I use my iPhone more.
- infecto 3y ago
  Only applies to the small portion of the population that enjoys the process. I could never appreciate digital cameras. Take a bunch of shots , then go home and filter those shots for the good ones, then adjust the color of those shots. No thanks, not my cup of tea. Funny enough I enjoy shooting film over digital. A lot less work and decision to be made.
  - baz00 3y ago
    I shoot film as well. It's definitely not less work but it is enjoyable. As for convenience, the DSLRs can be tethered to your phone now. I shoot on mine and they go to Apple Photos.
    - infecto 3y ago
      For myself at least there is less mental load shooting film compared to digital. I am not taking multiple shots of the same thing generally and I don't develop the film myself. Historically the two things I did not like about digital was too many photos to review and having to work on each photo at home. There is something about not having the choice of which shot to pick and how to adjust the colors that is nice. I have been interested in some of the micro 4/3 cameras that have prebuilt filters in them but I think film for me is king if I have a camera.
      - baz00 3y ago
        You can run a digital camera like that too. I am more interested in composition than camera set up and spend most of my time shooting in aperture priority. At best I'll tweak the white balance but the camera mostly just deals with that for me. I take few photos. I spent 16 days on a trek recently and took about 50 photos in total.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Phone cameras are digital cameras too.
    - 3y ago
- baq 3y ago
  The micro 4/3 M.Zuiko 45mm 1.8 is the bees knees - but the process of getting a useful shot into my family icloud album is so much work I rarely pull it out. Mirrorless really should be bodies with sensors and a thunderbolt connection to a smartphone.
  - baz00 3y ago
    Nikon's SnapBridge does that very well. Mine is tethered to my phone via WiFi when I'm out. Straight into my photo stream.
  - nehal3m 3y ago
    Affinity Photo will let you export an image into the Photo library directly from the editor. I use it to do minimal edits (a bit of crop, exposure, maybe highlights/shadows) and then go File > Share > Add to Photos. It's a great workflow for a hobby photographer like me and I like that it is a perpetual license. Adobe products will let a pro fly through hundreds of images a day, but this is more than enough for quick edits and dumping the files into iCloud. They offer a free trial, try it out! (I am not affiliated, just a happy user) https://store.serif.com/en-gb/checkout/?basket=ed0b9171805209fa7be266e0505e3b9a6e5662d246d33510 https://store.serif.com/en-gb/checkout/?basket=ed0b917180520...
- soultrees 3y ago
  I agree but for the average user who takes sunset pics, kid pics or pet pics and then view those pictures on the same device they shot it on, apple’s incentive isn’t so much about competing with full-frame mirrorless cameras, but instead to make the pictures shot on the iPhone look as good as possible on the iPhone. That way, the shooter gets the dopamine hit when they shoot something that triggers our visual sense in a positive way. My Sony a7iv gives me the same dopamine hit, maybe more so as there’s no better feeling than getting home, loading your footage into DaVinci and see that your exposure, focus and colours are nailed (on the other side of the coin, it’s a huge punch in the gut to get home and see your focus a little off, giving the opposite effect of a dopamine hit). But it’s more of a process to get there and the average user needs a faster feedback loop from shot to hit.
- Yeul 3y ago
  Basically every news event in the last 15 years is caught on phone cameras. That's the magic. A device with which you can start streaming to the world in 30 seconds.
- lazide 3y ago
  I’ve gotten far more amazing photographs (including exhibit quality large format ones) since smart phones became a thing than I ever had with an SLR. Because I always have the phone handy. If you’re always walking around with a camera bag? Sure. If you’re regularly in beautiful situations without one? Eh…
- matwood 3y ago
  I love my d7100 and z5. There are some pictures only they can take over a phone, but it would take a user much longer than 5 minutes to beat their iPhone. I’ve been carrying the current gen iPhone and my larger camera for years and I use the iPhone more and more. The shots are good and easy to set up. I mostly keep a zoom on my larger camera now to give me reach and often use the iPhone otherwise.
DonHopkins 3y ago
It's mainly zillions of photos of kids and pets and food, so it doesn't matter if other viewers aren't impressed, they're impressive to the person who took them.
Kaibeezy 3y ago
Please point to some of your favorite examples of this “creative explosion”. Here’s one I posted several months ago on intentional camera movement photography: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34858318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34858318
- rchaud 3y ago
  Yeah, from what I can tell, the vast majority of people's photos are only ever viewed on a phone.

baz00 3y ago

The magic of phone cameras disappears in a moment when you get hold of a mirrorless for 5 minutes. Even a bottom end one is orders of magnitude better than the best phone camera even if it’s got a lot less megapixels.

cooper_ganglia 3y ago
The magic of phone cameras lies in their convenience.
ClikeX 3y ago
My mirrorless definitely beats my iPhone. But I have to put in more time, it’s not with me at all times and I need to transfer the images. In the end, the best camera is the one I have with me. And if I can take a pretty good portrait shot of my kid while I’m at a diner then I’m happy. To me, the memory/moment is more important than the “quality”.
kajecounterhack 3y ago
I love my mirrorless, but it certainly wasn't 5 minutes. The first two lenses I tried (cheap ones obviously) were pretty underwhelming. Once I got a large aperture lens, I started to really get it. Even then, so many of my photos came out dark or blurry because I hadn't learned how to pick settings or focus for different lighting conditions and subject movement speeds. Autofocus on consumer cameras is pretty trash compared to iPhone/Pixel. EyeAF my ass. These camera companies need to invest more in their software. Superzoom, night sight, subject tracking and smart autofocus should be table stakes. Auto mode on my mirrorless should at least be on par out of the box with my phone. It's sad that the pixel phones with very old Sony sensors can take better 10x pictures than mirrorless out of the box. They need to worry less about better lenses and sensors, and worry more about better onboard compute capabilities.
- sgarland 3y ago
  Lenses make SUCH a difference. A family member asked me to shoot their wedding (no pressure, right?) and since without me it wouldn’t have happened, I agreed. I also rented some L glass for my SLRs, and holy shit was that eye-opening. Turns out that a $2000 lens is objectively better than a $300 lens, who knew? The clarity, the sharpness, the pop - everything was improved. Good glass is a bigger difference than the body.
  - kepler1 3y ago
    Can you say a bit more what you think was the factor? -- more control of depth of field / shallower DoF ability? -- faster shutter speeds? -- less chromatic aberrations? It doesn't intuitively feel like sharpness should be a factor -- even cheap kit lenses usually get that right.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      (Guessing the faster glass.)
    - weebull 3y ago
      * wider f-stop * less chromatic aberration * less distortion generally * smaller circle of confusion The chromatic aberration is an important but subtle effect. Remember that lenses are multiple pieces of glass, and every interface diffracts the wavelengths of light like a prism. One of the considerations in lens design is converging all those different wavelengths of light in the same place. Not just at one point, but at every point across the image plane. Poor lenses might do the well in an area. Good lenses do it everywhere.
    - sgarland 3y ago
      Sorry, should have clarified. The lens in particular that made me rethink everything else I had was a 70-200mm f/2.8L. Zooms in particular often suffer from sharpness and chromatic aberration issues compared to a prime due to the larger number of optics. This lens did not. I’m sure a comparable prime stuck next to it would still show it up, but coming from kit zoom lenses, it was quite a shocking difference. The static aperture also helps tremendously of course, yes - nice bokeh with a tight zoom means you can easily get candid portraits that look great from anywhere in the room.
olivermuty 3y ago
I bought a $1200 mirrorless which was supposedly the best in class a couple of years ago. All my photos look like they were shot on a potato compared to my iphone. Not to mention that I don't walk around with that mirrorless camera in my pocket at almost all times.
- baz00 3y ago
  I spent that and mine don't look like it's shot on a potato. Are you sure you know what you are doing? My Z50 and kit lens fits in my pocket fine.
  - olivermuty 3y ago
    Thats the whole point, I don’t know what I am doing.
    - baz00 3y ago
      Fix that. Then you have a right to complain :)
    - numpad0 3y ago
      I once asked someone with a nice piece of kit that wasn't too far from mine in cost. They said they sorted top to bottom on DxOMark list and bought one on the top and they didn't even know what a prime is. But that approach seemed to work.
    - arein2 3y ago
      put aperture, iso, focus, shutter speed on auto (if it's not a manual lens) and you will get good pictures
- criley2 3y ago
  I spent about that on a mirrorless and my photos blow smartphones out of the water. It takes 10x longer to setup, take, and post-process and is a hassle for many reasons, but the photo quality is extremely noticeably better.
- 3y ago
cyberax 3y ago
Ehh, no. My typical test is to take a photo of the full moon. It works acceptably well on an iPhone (or Android). My recent Pixel phone even adjusts the brightness automatically. Sure, the lens is pretty wide-angle, so the pictures don't have many details. I had to fiddle around for 20 minutes with settings on my Sony Alpha camera, eventually using manual focus and manual exposure. The pictures are, of course, better because of the lens and the full-frame sensor. But the user experience is just sad. So I often just don't bother to take my camera with me on my trips anymore. Also, a note to camera makers: USE ANDROID INSTEAD OF YOUR CRAPPY HOME-GROWN SHITWARE. Add 5G, normal WiFi, GPS, Play Store, a good touchscreen. You'll have an instant hit.
- baz00 3y ago
  No. That's a hill I'll die on. Ass end Nikon Z50, 250mm kit lens, hand held, no setup really other than shutter priority ... https://imgur.com/edCyNjV https://imgur.com/edCyNjV (very heavy crop!) And a Pixel 6a mutilating a shot: https://imgur.com/290gXkU https://imgur.com/290gXkU I do not want android on a phone. I don't want to update or reboot it. I want to turn it on, use it and turn it off again. And I don't want someone substituting pictures of the moon for stuff online (hey Samsung!)
  - criley2 3y ago
    Great example of the primary difference here. I've said that the photos out of my mirrorless (also Z50, great camera) are true photographs in the sense that they capture light and show it to me. My smartphone however does not create photos, it creates digital art based on the scene. Your Pixel image is a perfect example of how algorithms (now called "AI") re-paint a scene in a way that resembles reality when zoomed out. Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes.
    - kajecounterhack 3y ago
      > Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes. Calm down, it's not that bad. Take for example night sight or astrophotography; it's using ML to intelligently stitch together light across time because available light in one moment is not enough to capture anything intelligible. Your end result is an accurate representation of what your eyes see (e.g. my own face in a nighttime selfie) and what is sitting there in the sky (the stars). You can call that repainting, but I disagree, it's more information aggregation over the temporal dimension. Super resolution is similar, using shakes in your hand to gather higher resolution than you can accomplish with a single frame of data from your low res sensor grid. 2-3x digital zoom with super res technology is actually getting more information and more like optical zoom. It's not just cropping+interpolating. Now...portrait mode. That's clearly just post-processing. But also...does blurring the background using lens focus have any additional merit vs doing it in post (besides your "purity"-driven feelings about it)? At the end of the day, I want my mirrorless to do more than be a dumb light capture machine. I spent $X thousand+ for a great lens and sensor, so I want to maximize. It should do more to compensate automatically for bad lighting, motion blur, etc. It should try harder to understand what I want to focus on. As a photographer, I should get to think more about what photo I want taken and think less about what steps I need to take to accomplish that. My iPhone typically does a better job of this than my $X000 mirrorless. So I use my iPhone more.
infecto 3y ago
Only applies to the small portion of the population that enjoys the process. I could never appreciate digital cameras. Take a bunch of shots , then go home and filter those shots for the good ones, then adjust the color of those shots. No thanks, not my cup of tea. Funny enough I enjoy shooting film over digital. A lot less work and decision to be made.
- baz00 3y ago
  I shoot film as well. It's definitely not less work but it is enjoyable. As for convenience, the DSLRs can be tethered to your phone now. I shoot on mine and they go to Apple Photos.
  - infecto 3y ago
    For myself at least there is less mental load shooting film compared to digital. I am not taking multiple shots of the same thing generally and I don't develop the film myself. Historically the two things I did not like about digital was too many photos to review and having to work on each photo at home. There is something about not having the choice of which shot to pick and how to adjust the colors that is nice. I have been interested in some of the micro 4/3 cameras that have prebuilt filters in them but I think film for me is king if I have a camera.
    - baz00 3y ago
      You can run a digital camera like that too. I am more interested in composition than camera set up and spend most of my time shooting in aperture priority. At best I'll tweak the white balance but the camera mostly just deals with that for me. I take few photos. I spent 16 days on a trek recently and took about 50 photos in total.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Phone cameras are digital cameras too.
  - 3y ago
baq 3y ago
The micro 4/3 M.Zuiko 45mm 1.8 is the bees knees - but the process of getting a useful shot into my family icloud album is so much work I rarely pull it out. Mirrorless really should be bodies with sensors and a thunderbolt connection to a smartphone.
- baz00 3y ago
  Nikon's SnapBridge does that very well. Mine is tethered to my phone via WiFi when I'm out. Straight into my photo stream.
- nehal3m 3y ago
  Affinity Photo will let you export an image into the Photo library directly from the editor. I use it to do minimal edits (a bit of crop, exposure, maybe highlights/shadows) and then go File > Share > Add to Photos. It's a great workflow for a hobby photographer like me and I like that it is a perpetual license. Adobe products will let a pro fly through hundreds of images a day, but this is more than enough for quick edits and dumping the files into iCloud. They offer a free trial, try it out! (I am not affiliated, just a happy user) https://store.serif.com/en-gb/checkout/?basket=ed0b9171805209fa7be266e0505e3b9a6e5662d246d33510 https://store.serif.com/en-gb/checkout/?basket=ed0b917180520...
soultrees 3y ago
I agree but for the average user who takes sunset pics, kid pics or pet pics and then view those pictures on the same device they shot it on, apple’s incentive isn’t so much about competing with full-frame mirrorless cameras, but instead to make the pictures shot on the iPhone look as good as possible on the iPhone. That way, the shooter gets the dopamine hit when they shoot something that triggers our visual sense in a positive way. My Sony a7iv gives me the same dopamine hit, maybe more so as there’s no better feeling than getting home, loading your footage into DaVinci and see that your exposure, focus and colours are nailed (on the other side of the coin, it’s a huge punch in the gut to get home and see your focus a little off, giving the opposite effect of a dopamine hit). But it’s more of a process to get there and the average user needs a faster feedback loop from shot to hit.
Yeul 3y ago
Basically every news event in the last 15 years is caught on phone cameras. That's the magic. A device with which you can start streaming to the world in 30 seconds.
lazide 3y ago
I’ve gotten far more amazing photographs (including exhibit quality large format ones) since smart phones became a thing than I ever had with an SLR. Because I always have the phone handy. If you’re always walking around with a camera bag? Sure. If you’re regularly in beautiful situations without one? Eh…
matwood 3y ago
I love my d7100 and z5. There are some pictures only they can take over a phone, but it would take a user much longer than 5 minutes to beat their iPhone. I’ve been carrying the current gen iPhone and my larger camera for years and I use the iPhone more and more. The shots are good and easy to set up. I mostly keep a zoom on my larger camera now to give me reach and often use the iPhone otherwise.

DonHopkins 3y ago

It's mainly zillions of photos of kids and pets and food, so it doesn't matter if other viewers aren't impressed, they're impressive to the person who took them.

Kaibeezy 3y ago

Please point to some of your favorite examples of this “creative explosion”. Here’s one I posted several months ago on intentional camera movement photography: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34858318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34858318

rchaud 3y ago
Yeah, from what I can tell, the vast majority of people's photos are only ever viewed on a phone.