The answer is definitely both. There… I said it. I know deep down that most photographers will give a knee jerk negative reaction if asked the question as if it’s the only possible response. But are they really saying the existence of so many phone photographers is hurting photography, or the photographer? The two are very different things.
When executed well, photography is every bit as creatively relevant as the finest of paintings or expertly directed movie. Does it really matter if the photo was taken on an iPhone or something much bigger, heavier, with loads more buttons and more difficult to use properly? This is something I’ve thought about for quite some time. The first iPhone I purchased predates the first professional camera body I invested in by quite a significant margin. Probably close to 3 or 4 years of happy snapping on an iPhone back at the beginning of the 2010s. I got by just fine. The difference was, I was really only taking photos of me, or of the family or of the cat. That was about the sum total of my imagination and it worked out well. Did that change because I sunk a few grand on some serious camera gear or was it something else?
Something that always gets bandied about at Apple keynotes come September is “professional quality” photos from the latest hardware iteration of the iPhone. We now even have an iPhone Pro. More recently everyone from Google, Huawei, Samsung the rest of the Android posse seem to have jumped on this too. I admit, low light performance of recent handsets is quite staggering, especially considering the size of the sensors. Generally speaking, big, Pro cameras have big sensors. This enables them to suck up all available light and produce sharp images in low light conditions just the same as a nocturnal animal would do. Creatures like Bush Babies and Tarsiers have big eyes. That’s not a coincidence. Phone optics are restricted by basic physics. You can’t stack a large sensor array and a lens on a handset that thin. If you padded the handset out to be deep enough to take something more serious, you’d end up with what looks basically like a point and shoot camera. Point and shoot cameras don’t fit in your pocket and more importantly to the manufacturers – actually stopped selling due to their comparative lack of portability compared to a modern mobile camera phone. So, back to “studio quality”. What does that mean and why is that phrase so essential to the marketing angle when Apple queue up yet another “Shot on iPhone” advertising campaign?
“Shot on iPhone” means a couple of different things depending on what part of the consumer demographic is reading the statement. Imagine that Apple targets millennials, Instagram addicts and burgeoning Youtube vloggers with that phrase. They don’t hear “shot on iPhone”. They hear, “all I need to build a visual masterpiece and be the next big thing is an iPhone”. They don’t realise that there might be more going on off-camera to get those results staged, lit and edited. When Apple say it to a professional photographer, they hear something along the lines of….”shot on iPhone, probably had a ton of off camera lighting, a location scout, pro fashion models, loads of takes on multiple days, some wicked editing, perfect weather, exotic scenery and a dolly rig costing as much as my car”. Technological progress is inevitable and modern phones can take great images but is it the image you had in your head before you pressed the button? I think that’s the dilemma. Phones take great shots but is it the shot you wanted. A DSLR in the right hands will do this exact thing. “Shot on iPhone” is a brilliant marketing sting because, yes it was….but look closer and there is so much more that goes into it.
Mobile phones, even the ones with Pro printed in the back, are still not “pro” in any capacity that a professional photographer would aspire to but they are really, really good at taking a good picture in most circumstances and more importantly, easy to use in the hands of most users. A “good picture” being in focus, decent colour rendition, realistic contrast and low noise. That’s what they’re good at and why they do offer an upside. They offer a gateway into photography that up until now has never had this kind of ease of use relative to output quality. As far as I know, iPhones don’t select an appropriate model for a shoot, relax that model to get the best out of them, then frame and light the model with some in context Photoshop edits. That’s the downside.
Both Google and Apple have both been at the forefront of computational photography which they have chosen to bring to market in the form of phone hardware rather than separate camera hardware. This is just a sign of the times and economies of scale when manufacturing in the kind of numbers these devices get churned out at. I bet everyone you know has a phone with a camera in it. If that iPhone gets into the hands of the right person, it might just lead them down a career path that they never would have considered without access to device that happens to not only make phone calls, but also takes pretty good pictures. The next generation of professional photographers need to come from somewhere and I do believe that even if they start by getting a few pictures “shot on iPhone”, it doesn’t mean they’ll stop there.
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