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Comment by city17 | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is that for all the amazing technological improvements discussed, all the pictures in the article actually show that A. having a photographer who knows how to frame things, and sees the right moment to capture an image, and B. having a subject worthwhile photographing, are way more important than having a top tier quality camera.

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A photographer friend of mine always used to get comments like you can take such awesome shots because you are using a DSLR (this was 10 years back). So he started taking two pictures one with DSLR and one with a mobile cameras at that time.

He would still get the awesome shots comments even with the pics he took with the basic mobile camera and shared them on social media.

The joke goes something like.

A photographer visits a friend for dinner and shows her some of his photos, "Oh wow! these are spectacular" she gushes, "you must have an amazing camera". The photographer then replies "that dinner was great, you must have excellent pots".

That's not surprising. I'd put my money on a good photographer with a crummy camera rather than a crummy photographer with a good camera any day of the week. The biggest part of photography is being able to 'see' the photos before you even raise the camera.

they say it takes roughly 10k photos to get to the OK level in composition and this 'seeing' (and that obviously means 10k serious photo attempts not just 30 selfies per coffee mug in starbucks). Its not that much once you carry camera and ie go to nature over weekends and travel for holidays, or walk around a lot for street photography. I think it can be sped up a bit with editing photos in say Lightroom - ie once you keep cropping the photos in same way to get the best out of them, you grok what is required and do it already in camera, or electing the best composition out of few shots etc.

I guess it depends on the subject. E.g. no cameramen will take a good photo of flying birds with a shitty camera, but sure enough in good lighting conditions static scenes can be remarkably good even with worse hardware.

When he writes, "I took the iPhone 14 Pro on a trip around San Francisco and Northern California, to the remote Himalayas and mountains of the Kingdom of Bhutan, and Tokyo.", my first thought was: who IS this person? And is this article even at all real?

Its not some random article, its a commercial for Halide subscription.

that last bit gave me a huge chuckle

>...all the pictures in the article actually show that...

This simply is no longer as true as it once was. And has been for at least a decade. More than three decades ago my forward thinking cobol programmer friend stated, drunk, that in the future someone called a wedding photographer will be able to walk into an event with a digital camera, wave it around, then select images for publication without having to sit people, set tripods, or wait for that one-off unique special moment. They were right.

Kim Jung Gi (the artist) once said that the question he got most often was: what kind of brush pen do you use?

RIP to Kim Jung Gi. He could have drawn with a stick in sand and still produce brilliant art. But the tool is the thing that is most visible to admirers, and the thing that they can most easily replicate with their own work, so it doesn't surprise me that that's what most people misguidedly ask about. It's also much easier to buy a pen than it is to put decades of hard work and dedication into your art on a daily basis. Instant gratification.

It’s like asking Feynman about magnets.

Is this serious? Some of the side by sides are totally blacked out vs beautifully lit. The improvements in cameras open up the possibility of taking shots that would have simply not been possible. Sure photography is a skill. The realtime feedback on a smartphone might actually be the most significant improvement that smartphone has made to the camera. But discounting the obvious improvements in sensing an processing is just nonsense.

"Some of the side by sides are totally blacked out vs beautifully lit."

Those are the side-by-side examples to show the raw file latitude.

That's not new? Computational photography has existed for years in iPhone, and decent Night Mode shots have been possible since the Pixel 3. Nobody is changing the game here, it's just some Apple nerds talking about the new Apple product. That's fine, but it's passe to talk about how revolutionary a notched camera is, or how great computational photography has become. We know these things are good.

That's why these Halide iPhone camera reviews are perennially worthless. They've never released a review that feels critically substantially. It's simply "here's the new iPhone hardware we're being forced to support" being copywritten as ad-material for their app.

This has always been true.

Most of what professional cameras and lenses get you is the ability to get shots you otherwise couldn't - lower light, further distance, faster action, etc. Particular effect in DOF of flattening. Nothing that makes a good photo.

Without an eye, it's all wasted. But a good eye will see shots that can't be made; more of them if the camera at hand is limited.

That’s a good observation so far as it motivates people to learn photography skills. As soon as you know how to take photos, though, you resume appreciating what the right equipment lets you capture, or have a better chance to capture.

That's all true, but sometimes your overriding goal isn't to create a beautiful photograph, it's to record a particular thing at a particular moment.

Then camera technology really does make a massive difference, especially in low light, etc.

My very amateurish pov: quantity is the most important quality, take enough photos and you will end up with a few very good ones.

Kind of. If you have an image worth capturing but can’t capture it that’s a problem.

Well yeah but it doesn't hurt to make photography more accessible to everyone.

It was always pretty accessible, at least since 35mm was developed.

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