Ernie1 Doram
In terms of lenses though. With a camera if you put a 50, or 85mm lens on and shoot a portrait at 1.2 or something from a distance, and shoot the same shot with a smartphone, there’ll be no focal point on the phone, it’ll just all be in focus. It might be sharp, well rendered colour etc, but the camera will have beautiful depth of field (blurring the foreground and background) and far more actual sharpness.
I know there’s ‘portrait mode’ etc these days where software attempts to blur the background but it’s not really the same.
I have been taking photos with real cameras for decades, including professionally for a newspaper, so I know what depth of field is. :-)
The Tabasco bottle shot above was taken with the phone’s portrait mode. Not only could I make the background more or less blurry as I please, I can also change it after taking the photo (even if it wasn’t taken in portrait mode). Yes, it’s not exactly the same affect as my Nikkor 60mm 2.8 Macro lens, but I would argue 99% of people (including myself) would say the photo from the phone is better. Not to mention that the Nikkor lens on its own would cost almost three times what I spent on the phone.
The point I’m trying to make is that for a long time I refused to believe that phone companies could compete with photographic giants such as Nikon, Canon et al. in the photography arena. Given their experience, their history, their optics, the physical available size and the prices of their products, I was convinced that anything a phone can do, they can do much better. I couldn’t fathom the idea that a phone could compete with any of that. I assumed that while phone cameras were racing forward, cameras were doing the same with their technology. When my camera was lagging, I thought a new camera will surely be a huge step forward. But it wasn’t.
And when I look at the photos, I have to go with my eyes and admit to what I though was impossible until just recently - that the tables have turned. Maybe not for the top professional photography, but certainly for your every day photo needs.
