Our generation has witnessed major changes in photography over the decades. I’m sure most of you remember using Brownie Instamatic or Polaroid cameras. We now live in the age of digital photography; Kodak and Polaroid cameras are only memories and it is almost impossible to buy film cameras or film. For most of us the go-to camera is the one in our mobile phone, something we probably never envisioned even ten years ago.
By the late-1990s digital cameras were starting to become mainstream, and by 2010 just about everyone had replaced their film cameras with digital. The more serious among us used DSLR cameras (digital single-lens reflex), the digital equivalent of a 35mm single-lens reflex camera, and most snapshot cameras, know as point & shoot cameras, were digital as well. I carried a small point & shoot in my purse so that I would never be without a camera. In 2011 I bought my first iPhone, an iPhone 4, but I didn’t use the camera much because the quality of the photos it captured did not match the quality of my point & shoot. Over the next few years as I upgraded my phone, first to an iPhone 5 and then an iPhone 6, the quality of the photos kept improving. I often found myself taking a photo with my DSLR or point & shoot, and then taking the same photo with my iPhone as well. Eventually I stopped using the point & shoot, because the iPhone 6 photos were just that good. What really surprised me is how infrequently I found myself using my DSLR.
As some of you might know, I consider myself a fine art photographer, and photographs of mine have been accepted for exhibit in a variety of juried art shows. Last summer I was privileged to have a photograph accepted in the 2nd International Phone-ography Exhibition. What made that exhibition unique is that all of the displayed photographs were taken with a mobile phone (the majority iPhones), and the quality of the work was outstanding. Over three hundred photographers submitted entries and thirty were chosen by the juror to be printed and displayed. At the show’s opening, the other 270 photographs were available for viewing on a computer screen, and the quality of the images easily rivaled photographs taken with single-lens reflex cameras.
In September Apple introduced the iPhone 7 and I was excited to buy one — specifically the iPhone 7 Plus which features dual lenses. The main lens is the same lens found on the previous model, the iPhone 6s(28mm), a moderately wide-angle lens which is similar to lenses found on most point & shoot cameras. (Note: the wider the angle of the lens, the wider the field of vision.) The second lens is a telephoto lens(56mm) that brings objects closer to the viewer. In September I traded in my iPhone 6 for an iPhone 7 Plus and I couldn’t be happier with the camera.The photo quality is better than that of the iPhone 6, and I love having a telephoto lens available immediately.
Last season I wrote about wide-angle, telephoto, and macro Moment Lenses that attach to my iPhone (also available for Android phones). The lenses are made of high quality glass and work flawlessly. The Moment wide-angle is an 18mm lens that offers an even wider field of vision than the native lens, (the photo that was selected for inclusion in the Phone-ography exhibition was taken with a Moment wide-angle lens) and the macro lens is designed for extreme close-ups. I still use both of these lenses, but the Moment telephoto lens is roughly equivalent to the built-in telephoto on the iPhone 7 plus, and has become superfluous.
In an in depth comparison of images from a high-end DSLR camera and a mobile phone camera, the DSLR image is superior, but only marginally. I still use my DSLR and its 300 mm telephoto lens to bring distant objects closer than I could ever get with my iPhone. But for most of my day to day shooting I need nothing more than my iPhone. As the now popular saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you when you.
Next week I’ll cover some tips on how to shoot the best photos possible with a mobile phone camera. Until then, the online version of OnMouseClick can be found at onmouseclick.blogspot.com.
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