It’s really that comparable??
But they are excellent.
Good phone cameras have a value proposition all of their own, and they are utterly changing what we expect from photography.
My mobile has taught me that a lot of what I relied on or worked with in a DSLR or mirrorless is a crutch.
Mobile phone cameras force you, for example, to really think about composition, because you can't simply blur out the bits you don't like (portrait mode still sucks). They force you to think of other ways to isolate subjects, other ways to make use of light and contrast.
I've owned a lot of kit over 20 years or so, though I still own a lot of it -- I'm using a 14-year-old full frame DSLR and a seven year old full-frame mirrorless.
In the last two years, when studio portrait photography has been complicated or impossible, I have used my phone a lot, when out walking by myself. What I thought was just a way to not-totally-give-up photography has turned into a work of its own.
It will anger a lot of photographers who like to whine about how mobile phone cameras can't do X, Y and Z, but here's the truth: if you don't understand what a mobile phone camera can teach you as a photographer, you're probably not really trying.
A solid color workflow, tilt-shift/specialized optics, high resolution, and lighting/strobe control all go to the DSLR system, whereas just about everything else goes to the iPhone.
Personally I think almost all of the output of phone cameras (except what's in their glossy ads) is missing a certain je ne sais quoi that distinguishes Photography (note the capital P) from an ordinary photo. That and you can pry the amazing bokeh from a high-quality SLR lens from my cold dead hands.
You might, but even then you might also consider that learning from one medium can translate even to a very different medium.
But in any case here we're not talking about quite different media. The images are processed and edited in fundamentally the same way. As a result, many photographers tend to perceive the one (mobile phone digital photography) as an inherently inferior subset of the range of the other (large digital sensor photography).
This is because photographers -- particularly in the digital era -- do not ordinarily consider the creative advantages of self-imposed restrictions.
And when deliberate creative restrictions are suggested, the immediate response is to dismiss them or to suggest that they are wasteful (you're losing information at capture), better achieved in post-processing (so you have more "flexibility").
So there is a "precision maximalist" and "gear maximalist" default to most contemporary photography. Use the sharpest, fastest, least quirky lens you can get, shoot at the highest resolution, buy the latest if you can.
All of these things are narrowly valuable in some area of photography, but they get glommed together to make a giant assumption.
The mobile phone presents a convenient, nearly unavoidable way to question many of the impacts of that maximalist position.
One of the things I often want to do is ask photographers "why are your DSLR photos better than your friend's mobile phone photos?" and then poke them in the ribs each time they mention the technical advantages of their kit. But it would generally get quite violent.
I wouldn't conflate "buy the latest you can" with gear maximalism. My own journey with that started with dissatisfaction of the quality of the output that I had, and, as I became a better photographer, running up against the limits of my camera and lens. Then, after understanding what I was experiencing was indeed the hardware and not a limitation of my skill, I upgraded, and the hardware leapfrogged my abilities. Then I got better and I once again started hitting the limits of my hardware. Though I am now at a point where the hardware and my abilities are so good that I am content with the output as one can reasonably expect for a hardcore amateur. My point is that "gear maximalism" is not always just mere materialism.
As for the phone, it's convenient. I can guss it up and if the output is sufficiently pig-like I can put lipstick on it til it looks good enough. With the right software I can even output RAW files and theoretically feed them into Lightroom like my normal workflow. But it will never be as good, and there are so many techniques that I simply can't do with it.
"The best camera is the one in your hand" is true and all, but it's flooding the world with shit photos. Good is the enemy of great, after all.
But that's the point of what I'm getting at, concerning limitations and maximalism.
We've got into a mindset where we seek to push the edges of the kit we have -- we are urged to shoot faster lenses, shallower depth of field, lower and lower light.
But it doesn't get you a higher rate of good photos. A good photo is a good photo regardless of kit, and it's possible to flounder creatively when you have more scope.
As a photographer I think we should be able to creatively progress with whatever photographic tool we have in our hands. See a creative angle, refine it, improve on it, etc. Finding a way to be creative within a set of limitations is all that matters, and therefore starting with a serious set of restrictions is good practice.
FWIW I am a fairly good portraitist, a long-standing small-venue gig photographer, and I'm pretty technically-minded. But thinking back to the first DSLR I owned (a secondhand Fuji S2 Pro), I can think of precisely one photographic limitation I'd run into regularly even now: its high ISO performance was not that good. Otherwise I'd have that camera back to shoot with, even now, especially in the studio. Though I might rage at the maximum card capacity.
I'm regularly surprised to hear people talking of hitting the photographic limits of the kit they use; it suggests to me very specific niches or unusually rubbish kit lenses (I've owned one of those, and even then I got some results I liked).
Because I can't think of a popular DSLR made after about 2005 that is bad; certainly not after 2008. I can think of only a couple of entry-level DSLR or mirrorless cameras with limitations that would trouble me (the lack of a depth of field preview being the main one, aside from glasses-unfriendly viewfinders).
I still shoot with digital kit I bought 13 years ago, and got some of my best results in the last few years with the oldest of those cameras that is now so cheap I'm better off not selling it. I've only bought secondhand, old-model equipment since 2011. I probably won't ever buy new again -- except maybe a Cambo Actus.
The same is true of lenses. I'm currently doing a bit of work with an early 1980s Vivitar wide-to-standard zoom that cost me £30. Crap in the corners, gorgeous otherwise. I don't plan to buy a new lens ever again.
I'd always recommend going back to your former kit (buy it again, cheap on eBay) and testing those beliefs about limits in retrospect.
> But it doesn't get you a higher rate of good photos.
Beg to differ here, if one knows what they're doing.
I do a lot of low-light, event photography, among other stuff, and the fancy expensive kit is just flat-out way better. I've shot thousands of these photos with both by now, and the extra technical flexibility is totally worth it. Hell, the extra sensor size and autofocus alone took me to a whole new level. Do you know how much it sucks trying to do low-light with manual focus at a DJ performance because your autofocus can't keep up? How much time do you want to spend twiddling noise reduction controls because the entry-level kit's ISO 1600 looks like crap? How much shadow detail are you willing to sacrifice? It's such a pain in the ass.
And through all that I like to take a few shots with my phone for the instant social media gratification... and those shots are never anywhere near as good. The color is flatter, depth of field is blah, everything is just...meh. They look good on instagram, but that's about it.
> I can think of precisely one photographic limitation I'd run into regularly even now: its high ISO performance was not that good. Otherwise I'd have that camera back to shoot with, even now, especially in the studio. Though I might rage at the maximum card capacity.
Growing up I messed around with 35mm and even had a SLR camera for a short while. But I got serious with my first DSLR (a Nikon D3100). Maybe I was wrong in expecting something comparable to my old 35mm stuff but the dynamic range sucked, high ISO sucked (1600 is grainy AF), autofocus with like 12 points with only one cross-type sensor sucked, and no matter how good I focused the image (even on a nice 35mm prime) I couldn't get the razor sharpness I was after. There was something about how that sensor processed certain light transitions that had a really nice quality, and the camera took a lot of hits, but ultimately I felt like I was hitting a plateau.
One example: I like to do long-exposure shots of firedancers doing their thing. Depending on the fuel type the dancer uses there could be a lot of dynamic range to deal with, and most of the other photographers in this space seem to struggle in coping with it: either the dancer is exposed nicely but the flame is blown out, or the flame is exposed nicely but the dancer is super dark (losing a lot of color detail if you try and fix it in post). Or they just try to squash both together and the picture looks like a bad HDR merge. Here is another place where the sensor and lens matters a ton and both my phone and my DX kit struggle. Can I do and have I done these shots on that kit? Sure. But the nice camera, with its amazing sensor, and the amazing lenses I have for it, are able to capture way more detail, and as a result I get way better results straight-away and spend way less time in post trying to fix things.
At a first approximation every great photo -- even every great live music photo -- has been taken with equipment less capable than that D3100.
Ansel Adams did his best work on equipment far less capable than a D3100.
The point is...?
Mm, yep. I do gig photography in small, dark venues -- I've shot probably 125 thousand photos at high ISOs, with six different cameras (Nikon DSLRs for the bulk of it, and Sony mirrorless experiments alongside in a parallel track).
> Hell, the extra sensor size and autofocus alone took me to a whole new level.
The difference in light gathering between an APS-C and full-frame camera of the same technological era is usually about one stop. If you make a several-year jump at the same time, that can be noticeable, I suppose.
> Do you know how much it sucks trying to do low-light with manual focus at a DJ performance because your autofocus can't keep up?
At gigs, I do quite a lot of manual focus (and single-point, back-button focus with manual adjustment). I have no particular issue with it and it helps solve problems autofocus simply cannot solve.
Especially with a Nikon, because you get focus point confirmation even manually.
You do a lot more thinking and observation about equivalent distance. For example if you cannot focus on someone's face because they are behind a brightly lit microphone that autofocus will always prefer: How far are they behind it? If you focus further down the microphone stand or on a belt buckle, lock and recompose on their face, without changing your position, how much does that correct it? Or can you judge how far in inches and then literally move yourself or your camera forward?
One good cross-type sensor is all you absolutely need (stay away from old-style Phase One autofocus kit if this bothers you!)
Admittedly back button focus makes that more useful. And focus peaking on a mirrorless camera is the bee's knees.
> How much time do you want to spend twiddling noise reduction controls because the entry-level kit's ISO 1600 looks like crap? How much shadow detail are you willing to sacrifice? It's such a pain in the ass.
I said above that the only thing that really forced me to upgrade from my S2 Pro was low light performance. But again, I think if I was to go back to using that camera, I would be getting results I wanted a whole stop, maybe a stop and a half faster than I did at the time, through better subject selection, better understanding of its limitations and fifteen years more understanding of exposure.
If you're talking about the D3100, I'd shoot that up to ISO 3200, I reckon. Its low light ISO performance is a little better than the D300 which I used for years at gigs with enormous success. And its dynamic range is not all that noticeably worse. As long as you are careful with your exposure, that's a useful little camera.
DxO Optics Pro/PhotoLab helps of course.
Newer kit does a lot of stuff better, certainly, and it can save you time. And yeah, low light photography is about the only place people run up against the limitations of older kit. But IMO nothing since 2008 has any kind of problem with low light, and in many cases the newer kit is tripped up by the exact same difficult situations.
Maybe it works for your style, but it was cramping mine. There is enough suffering in art, why add to it?
> The difference in light gathering between an APS-C and full-frame camera of the same technological era is usually about one stop. If you make a several-year jump at the same time, that can be noticeable, I suppose.
That's exactly what I am talking about, a sensor and format upgrade after several years. I have a DX body of the same generation and its sensor performance is very close to its FX brother, and they're both considerably better than the D3100.
SLR is a specialized format designed for fast autofocus used by news/sports photographers and 35mm “full frame” is not the largest film size.
Rangefinder and mirrorless formats actually have a much easier time with lens design and don’t need such gigantic lenses, which might make them less impressive looking than an SLR, but I have a cheap Mamiya medium format rangefinder that takes better street photos than they do. And if you’re doing product or landscape photography, you want a large format digital back like Phase One or a view camera, which really are the top of the line.
Designed for, no. Optimised for and evolved for, yes! :-)
When the SLR emerged it was definitely slower than the cameras press photographers were using. Even the later instant-return-mirror models, probably. Press photographers didn't switch to SLRs until the Nikon F arrived fifteen years later, in the first few years of the Laos and Vietnam wars. Press shooters mostly hadn't been shooting 35mm for more than a decade before that.
The rest: I'm not convinced at this point, and I think high-end mirrorless really blurs most of those boundaries pretty conclusively. We're definitely stepping towards a formatless world in the sense of distinct boundaries, with computational photography being a big part of it.
Which is precisely why I'd urge really any digital photographer to spend as much time learning to get the best out of their mobile phone as possible. It is one point on the continuum; small sensors but a lot of computation.
> Mobile phone cameras force you, for example, to really think about composition, because you can't simply blur out the bits you don't like (portrait mode still sucks). They force you to think of other ways to isolate subjects, other ways to make use of light and contrast.
I would argue that Bokeh is an incredibly important tool that is part of composition and saying it is just there to "blur out the bits you don't like" seems weird to me.
And yet that is exactly how many photographers use depth of field. Especially amateur portraitists; the shallowest depth of field they can pull off, with the eyes sharp and the least "distracting" background.
(Ever notice the fundamental difference between commercial editorial photography and amateur portrait photography? It is this. Amateur portraitists use blurry backgrounds as a tool to escape complexity.)
FWIW, 25 years ago we would not have had this conversation (notwithstanding the non-existence of HN), because this idea of out-of-focus-rendering as an inherently important quality of a specific lens almost did not ever come up. (And we didn't have the word until Mike Johnston introduced it to the english language).
Bokeh obsession (as distinct from what used to be called "choosing the right depth of field for your composition") is a very modern, super-fast-aperture, gear-maximalist thing. The mobile phone bursts this very contemporary bubble, if you'll excuse the pun.
To be clear what I mean is that really the "shot at f/1.4 wide open" portrait thing is an amateur phenomenon. It is just not a big part of commercial portraiture at all, outdoors or in.
> TBH, when I shoot the wide end of my kit lens on the X-T30 and don't pixel peep, it's hard to tell apart the jpeg's from my camera and my phone.
Right. This is what I find -- especially with black and white images (my iPhone seems to produce images that work well with, say, a Pan F thing).
But this depth of field stuff what I mean about the way mobile phones force you to think about subject isolation, all of the time; even on the telephoto lens except with subjects less than a couple of feet away.
My experience is that people who have never used a DSLR do not have as much trouble getting phone photos they like that are actually good.
Partly because they haven't had either the scope or crutch it offers; they are used to seeing and instinctively composing without it.
Also because DSLR users spend most of their time composing wide open, not at their target aperture, which ultimately warps our perception and steers us towards shooting images more like the full-time view we get from the viewfinder.
There is an art to subject isolation in composition with constant front-to-back sharpness at all times, and a mobile phone will force you to think about it.
There is trade offs, none of them justifies carrying heavy gear around most of the time.
edit: it’s a hobby and I just spent a lot of time trying to take pretty pictures, and searching the proper cost tradeoff to do them
I think this is also why we see lots of people who own high end full-frame etc., are now adapting old lenses, building extraordinary DIY rigs like the "digital camera obscura" trend of the moment, making entirely custom lenses with surplus optics and 3D printers, etc.
It's the same reason as for why there's so much interest in film.
These things have different strengths. I think mobile phones have liberated photography in a way unparalleled since the time when 35mm film liberated photography.
There was a period when DSLRs were improving pretty rapidly and it made sense to move up on a pretty regular cadence because the new stuff was so much better. (And we've seen this with phones more recently.)
There's definitely a retro aspect to film and vinyl. Personally that's not for me having lived with the limitations of both. But I spent years working with custom film developing chemistry and the like.
But I think I view film photography, darkroom work, and mobile phones in basically the same way.
They are just some photography tools among many, and my photography education would be incomplete without them.
I spent a lot of time on it and got a lot of enjoyment out of it. I also probably got a bit burned out and wasn't really interested any longer once I didn't have easy access to a good darkroom any longer. But yeah, happy I did it, zero interest in doing any longer. Digital pretty much rekindled that interest.
(Also could really not get into video in those days because overhead was just too much. Don't have obvious entry point into creative video these days but at least casual is easier.)