iPhone 7 Plus Depth Effect Is Legit

There are already enough people saying how good phone cameras are getting. They're right. Software tricks like this help overcome some of the physical hard-limitations.

But let's not be too silly. They still don't hold a candle to high-end DLSRs. Not really.

What this really drives home for me is how lazy Nikon and Canon really are in their markets. There's almost no innovation and when there is —assuming we can really call adding wifi connectivity is innovative— it's awfully executed. It's easier to take the SD card out of my camera and stick it in an adaptor in my phone than it is to turn on the wifi, connect via my phone (which disconnects it from its wifi) and then slowly copy files out. The idea that you might want to take a photo and use it immediately is completely foreign to them.

One day somebody's going to notice this, make a pro-lens-compatible system with modern interfaces and connectivity and completely displace Nikon and Canon from their own pro-sumer market.

I have a feeling that this is going to lead to a reduction of the use of shallow DoF effects in the long term. Shallow DoF is for sure sometimes creatively appropriate, but a big part of its popularity is that it's an effect that you can only get with relatively expensive camera systems. There is a natural tendency amongst photographers to overestimate the creative benefits of effects that can only be achieved with expensive equipment.

In large format photography, a $150 Crown Graphic can give you extremely shallow DoF, whereas it takes a camera with tilt and shift and a wide coverage lens to get an image that's sharp throughout the frame. Inevitably, large format photography forums are full of people obsessing about what expensive equipment they need to achieve deep focus.