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Comment by RayVR | Hacker News Reader

I forget which photographer/camera blogger/reviewer wrote this many years ago, but it has stuck with me: "the best camera is the one you have with you"

His point being that carrying around a bunch of heavy gear is not pleasant.

A lot of camera and lens sales were driven by progress at the margins without any serious benefit to the average user. Until the smartphone. Now, the number of people with surprisingly good cameras which they have with them almost constantly is absolutely astounding.

Yes, I can still roughly tell the processed shots from portrait mode on my phone from a much better camera but the differences aren't as drastic as you'd imagine. Most importantly, I have the camera with me.

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This is true for exactly one kind of photography - the one where we use pictures to capture memories and moments in time. And while I agree that that's a majority for most of us ("99% of us 99% of time", to quote somewhat exaggerating Hugh Brownstone), that's by no means all of it.

The smartphone camera can never "fully" replace an actual camera gear simply because of the choice of lenses and therefore the fields of view that the camera gives us. Optics is somewhat heartless in this respect.

AI and image processing can to a point simulate the feeling that the fixed focal length lenses of these cameras give us, but currently (and for the foreseeable future of at least a decade) they have a tough time going beyond that.

What we see now is the camera market shifting from mass use to a niche. "Prosumers", videographers, YouTubers and such.

We bought a dSLR and a specific lens geared toward “point and click” of landscape and travel photos because after traveling to a few places pictures that looked great on a phone did not scale to any large prints or screens. That camera along has produced fantastic photos and I consider it money well spent.

> Yes, I can still roughly tell the processed shots from portrait mode on my phone from a much better camera but the differences aren't as drastic as you'd imagine.

This. I have my Apple TV set up to cycle through my favorite shots in my photo stream and I can tell immediately the quality difference between my slr shots and ones taken on my iPhone. The colors are more accurate, the bokeh more subtle, and excellent sharpness. Even when comparing shots from 7 years ago to todays iPhone 14.

Unfortunately my slr sits collecting dust because, well, the phone is “good enough”.

"the best camera is the one you have with you"

Or for beginner film makers. "Start with the camera you already have" (i.e. your phone)

Or don't. This is common advice layman / cloud level famous director advice that is in practice utterly misplaced. There are tonnes of fun little phone film festivals. No influential independent film festivals accept phone films. There are 2 - 3 films shot on phones that have ever been give a major (independent) release / distribution. Only one of those was not from an established director, Sean Baker's 'Tangerine'. They used dozens of phones, a full crew and specialised lenses custom made for the production.

Shooting narrative with a phone is a gimmick - with very few and specific hidden camera doc exceptions. Phones don't teach you anything about the mechanics of camera work or post, from how different lenses change the feeling of a shot to pulling focus ISO, t-stop, color spaces, data rangling etc. They teach bad habits like relying on autofocus and IBIS.

They may be the best camera that isn't a camera, but in terms of starting as a beginner filmmaker - you'd be much better off learning with even very outdated DSLR.

I was going to say Tangerine! I was excited to know such a random factoid. I didn’t realize it’s the only film from non-famous directors, writers, and actors.

Film festivals?

I think you and I have very different ideas what a "beginner film maker" means. If you have never told a story using the medium of moving pictures you should not worry about film festivals, or ISO, or t-stop, or colour spaces, or major releases / distribution, or anything like that.

Go grab the stuff you already have. Try to tell a story with that gear. Show it to your friends. Did they like it? Awesome, keep at it. Did they not like it? Get better friends, or tell better stories. Improve your art and craft as you progress one step at a time.

People who worry about film festivals, but haven't ever put two frames after each other are delusional.

There is a tendency in a lot of people to think that they should not try to do things until they are somehow anointed by someone or something. They think they could make a film, only if they would have a professional camera. Or they think they could do it only if they get into a school where they become something they are not yet. This advice is for those people. Instead of waiting around to do something some day they should start now and start getting better with what they have today.

If quality matter for you, smartphone is not answer. It won't replace camera designed for taking photographs with much higher dynamic range.

Sure, heavy DSLR's are annoying to care on trip but again... If you are casual snapshot taker, then smartphone is enough.

Or there are compact professional cameras like Fujifilm x100 series.

Smartphones have better dynamic range than dedicated cameras because they have better software and exposure stacking. If your subject stands still, that is. That’s why iPhones can save HDR photos you can actually view in HDR.

People editing camera raws in Lightroom still export them to sRGB JPEG at the end of the day. The main thing they’re doing with the dynamic range in those sensors is getting rid of it because there’s no ecosystem to view it. (Oddly, there is an ecosystem for HDR video, just not stills.)

Plenty of monitors with higher dynamic range than sRGB, and plenty of people take pictures to print them, and there's also plenty of times you need the dynamic range to get something out of the shadows and highlights.

And if you have a still subject, any serious camera will allow you to do bracketing so you can combine shots.

> Plenty of monitors with higher dynamic range than sRGB

Being P3 (WCG) doesn't mean it's also HDR or that it's calibrated well or that the display software is handling it.

> And if you have a still subject, any serious camera will allow you to do bracketing so you can combine shots.

So you can combine them how into what? There's no good software for it. HDR combining software typically creates SDR images, not eg EXR files, and it usually looks bad doing it.

> and plenty of people take pictures to print them

What's that got to do with HDR?? Surely reflective media has less dynamic range than transmissive media…

> Being P3 (WCG) doesn't mean it's also HDR or that it's calibrated well or that the display software is handling it.

There are plenty of monitors with both a larger gammut and higher dynamic range.

> So you can combine them how into what? There's no good software for it. HDR combining software typically creates SDR images, not eg EXR files, and it usually looks bad doing it.

So you can combine it into a raw image with higher dynamic range. FF cameras generally have 12-13 stops of dynamic range without bracketing at 14 bits per channel, so you can absolutely tonemap them into an HDR image, even without bracketing. With bracketing, you can generate a raw image which will have 24 bits or more of dynamic range, which will actually be useful.

I'm not talking about cheesy HDR combining software, I'm talking about, for example, combining images into Lightroom with a high bit-depth workflow which can then be exported as an EXR or TIFF image. There's plenty of software that can generate even higher bitdepth, and these are often used in CGI to generate HDRI maps, for example.

The dynamic range of the actual image of the camera far exceeds any screen you might show it on. You're really only limited by the noise floor (which is close to the theoretical limit).

> What's that got to do with HDR?? Surely reflective media has less dynamic range than transmissive media…

Reflective media has theoretically infinite dynamic range, you're only limited by how black your black is and of course by the printer.

Sorry, but HDR stacketing is something completely different from sensor dynamic range.

With your logic, you can say that we can make static image with same results with any sensor.

> With your logic, you can say that we can make static image with same results with any sensor.

We can't do that because of lenses and diffraction, but that's different from being able to avoid exposure and sensor noise issues. You can in fact avoid those with more sampling.

> the differences aren't as drastic as you'd imagine

And a honda accord driver won't be able to drive a formula one faster than a formula four around the track, give it to someone who knows how to drive and the difference will be drastic

That was Chase Jarvis if memory serves. Even published a book about it.

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