[potatolicious]

> "The other group are people who argue the details of a phase detection autofocus in the Canon DSLR and the 51 point field autofocus of the Nikon DSLR and can't believe that the handset makers are allowed to actually call these things 'cameras' in their advertisements."

This demographic can be safely ignored. The people who get the most up in arms about the "purity" of photographic tools are also the ones producing the least work. They're the ones who buy $10,000 worth of bodies and lenses but can never go beyond photos of their local park, or sharpness test charts in their basement. This group isn't good for much more than vociferous, highly-technical religion wars on the Internet. We'll start caring what they think when they start producing work.

In the mean time there are many passionate photographers out there producing great work, with a variety tools, cheap to expensive, simple to complex.

This guy with a crappy old iPhone 3GS has been taking better photos (and publishing them) than the bulk of people with 5D3's and 70-200 f/2.8's: http://boingboing.net/2009/10/29/photographer-takes-p-1.html

[piyush_soni]

Really, I don't see anything good in his photos. All these post-processed photos lack a lot of detail, even from a smartphone standards.

[potatolicious]

And this is part of the problem - it was never about detail, or more generally technical perfection. But yet that's where the conversation starts and stops. The conversation around cameras focuses on noise level, dynamic range, or lens sharpness - none of which are particularly critical traits for producing great photography.

The Tank Man[1] photograph would not pass muster even by low-end cell phone standards today, but it's as powerful now as when it was shot.

Nor Cartier-Bresson's famous "leaping man"[2] - more dynamic range, more sharpness, less noise, less grain, would not have made the image any better.

Even moving into modern times, Bruce Gilden didn't need perfect sharpness or dynamic range to document the yakuza from the inside[3]. Not only did he not fuss over focus points and phase-detect vs. contrast-detect autofocus, he didn't even have autofocus!

Like Weegee said: "f/8 and be there". It's about the picture, not the gear. You only care about the gear insofar as it enables you - and nearly all cameras (including cell phone cameras) are well past the point of enabling.

And this is the problem with the "argues about gear on the internet" demographic - they don't produce. They spend a lot of money and time acquiring, testing, and verifying the technical perfection of their gear, and too little time actually photographing. The best you get out of this group are is technically-perfect banality.

[1] http://iconicphotos.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/030.jpg

[2] http://www.dienes-and-dienes.com/Assets/CBManLeaping.jpg

[3] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--vyBAjPjz6U/TkgF6Qla38I/AAAAAAAAJA...

[vinkelhake]

All other things equal, better equipment will allow you to get better shots. You are aware that the iconic Tank Man photograph was shot from half a mile away. It would have been impossible to shoot with today's camera phones.

I know that when I shoot my banal pictures of banal life, I prefer pictures where the focus isn't accidentally on the background or where the subject hasn't half-exited the frame because of a delay between pressing the button and the shot going off.

Most of us are not in the habit of documenting the Yakuza or happening to be present in world-changing events. We just want to take pictures that look good, even if the subject is banal.

Edit (since I'm not allowed to comment on the post):

> This is the part we disagree. Better knowledge will allow you to get better shots

We're not in disagreement. "All other things equal" means just that - all other things being equal - including knowledge. Of course a bad picture with perfect focus is still a bad picture. Likewise, a good picture can become even better if it's technically accomplished. Tank Man is an iconic photograph solely because of the subject matter. Ansel Adams didn't settle for a dinky rangefinder when heading out into Yosemite. He carried large heavy equipment because it would allow him to capture the detail and sharpness he wanted.

[potatolicious]

> "All other things equal, better equipment will allow you to get better shots."

This is the part we disagree. Better knowledge will allow you to get better shots - we've gone past the point long ago where improving technical capability made dramatic improvements to how well people can photograph.

Ultimately what makes or breaks a photograph isn't sharpness, or even focus in particular, it's exposure and composition. That shite picture isn't made any less shite because the focus is bang-on. Likewise, a well-composed image survives a great deal of mis-focus, blur, or other technical faults.

If an image is shit because the focus was off, I'd hate to say it, but it wouldn't have been an excellent image even if the focus was on.

Short of extremely equipment-demanding niches (like macro, or sports) the problem is practically always with the photographer, not their equipment. The photographer is the most common bottleneck in creating great images - of any subject, banal or world-changing. Spend money on education, not more gear - and more importantly, spend time.

Technological advancements will give us much-appreciated conveniences, it won't make you a good shooter when you weren't before.

Side note: this is why I'm a fan of things like iPhonenography classes, as much as people like to mock it. Ultimately putting a camera into everyone's pockets has been great for photography and expression, and elevating the quality of this stuff (whether intended as art or just personal enjoyment) involves education, not gear.

[tripzilch]

I'm inclined to agree with you, but a bunch of common counterexamples immediately spring to mind. Very often, sorting through a huge amount of low quality phone camera pics from a party or something, I encounter a "happy accident" that would have made a great photo if only: it had been properly in focus, not blown out by light, less noisy (especially when you'd normally crop the pic, phone camera grain is way uglier than film grain), or any of those things that'd a medium-quality camera suffers way less from.

Am I wrong? Is the blurry picture possibly just as great (even if you can't recognize my friends' face?), or would it have turned out to be a shitty picture after all, obscured by the lack of focus?

[vertex-four]

Would you have got the details right and taken that particular photo at all if you were paying more attention to each shot? I don't think this has much to do with the camera - if the picture's blurry, you were likely taking it in a hurry, and you would've taken it in a hurry if you had a real camera.

[PavlovsCat]

> And this is part of the problem - it was never about detail, or more generally technical perfection.

While I agree with you for the most part, and never argue about gear (other than having been a fan of Bibble before they were bought).. there is one thing I really miss from your example photos, and from smartphone photography, and that is something being out of focus. Now, I'm not a great photographer, I just take snapshots and then edit them badly, but for example this I like: http://a.sandboxx.org/johann/376/

I wouldn't be surprised if that will one day be possible with very compact lenses, or with multiple ones plus software or whatever, but for the time being, at least for some shots, you need focal length period. Candid and news photography is a lot different from, say, wedding and product photography. And if an algorithm allows better handheld photos, it also makes tripod photos even better, so sometimes there isn't even a gap being closed, it all just gets shifted.

> nearly all cameras (including cell phone cameras) are well past the point of enabling.

During that same vacation, while sitting at the beach in the morning, I noticed a fish jumping out of the water. Using my 1337 video game target leading skills, I moved the viewfinder across the ocean surface where I expected the fish to be, and was able to take two photos of it, one with two ladies having a chat while doing their morning swim. Again, not a great photo, but for me as the person who sat there, it's a nice memory, something that will always make me smile http://a.sandboxx.org/johann/241/ And it's still totally a snapshot, I just sat at the beach, watching sea gulls, smoking cigarettes. Candid ocean photography, if you will ^^ Of course I got lucky, I wouldn't have had time to change lenses; but still, cell phones cameras are not "well past" being able to reach everywhere.

I'm really happy for anyone who makes photos, and I think you are right that dismissing them on technical grounds is silly. A good photo does not need to justify how or why it was done, and when it comes to once-in-a-lifetime moments, even a drawing from memory is better than nothing. But just like you can make a useful website with just HTML and no CSS, and a very pretty and functional one without Javascript, doesn't mean these tools don't have their uses, right? What's more, sometimes a website that works fine without them, would work even better with them, and not everybody who cares about progress and performance is not getting anything done - those things are orthogonal. It can't just be easily generalized.

[micampe]

Check any photo from any of the great 35mm photographers of the past century and let me know how much detail you see and how much that detracts from the photo's value (not talking about monetary value of course).

[chillingeffect]

yeah I mean really: http://www.boingboing.net/filesroot/alleyway.jpg

It's not what I would call pro by almost any definition. There is the 3x3 grid alignment, but dat fuzzy focus, those colors and the overblown lantern...

It's a fine personal snapshot, but to call it "pro" is weak.

[cema]

Detail is not necessarily what one should be looking for in a photo.

[piyush_soni]

Sure, that was just one of the things it lacked as compared to the DSLRs. I'm not sure what's so amazing in these photographs (as compared to DSLRs) - to my untrained eyes they don't look great.

[footpath]

You are still looking at it from a purely technical perspective. In the article, the photographer already mentioned that he's only using the iPhone for the "composition and the perfect photo opp".

The point of the parent, I think, is that in the hands of a competent photographer, any adequate camera can produce works of certain artistic merit. Those who are most up in arms about the technical aspects of a camera often ignore the artistic aspects of a photograph.

Here is a video of how an awarding-winning cinematographer (Phillip Bloom) films a short video using a low-resolution Barbie Doll camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VS3C183G8g

All technical aspects of the Barbie Doll camera are dismal, but the end product, when viewed as a whole, is not something that an Average Joe can produce, even if equipped with a RED ONE camera.

[technofiend]

Guitarists have the same arguments (like audiophiles) about warmness and tone of their work. But the fact of the matter is: if you don't practice enough to reliably produce a chord of your choice, does it really matter if you're plunking on a Squier Strat or one of Hendrix's original guitars? Not really. Equipment bragging rights don't mean anything without a modicum of practice and talent.

[mnem]

Interestingly, he seems to use multiple cameras. For example, the alley shot as taken with a Lumix GF1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sasurau/3944365957/ - personally I find the feeling of the Lumix one far more emotive in this case.

I totally agree that it's not the price of your equipment though, it's what you do with it - most of the time. Photography has a great many reasons to occur and there are aspects which most definitely benefit from higher quality equipment. For example, nature macro photography (some beautiful examples from the same photographer above: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sasurau/sets/72157631002090680... ). I guess the more you are looking for "The Decisive Moment", the less raw quality matters. Although, again, something like studio photography is likely to be a balance of quality and decisive moments.

Ultimately, unless you're getting most of your income from the photographs, just make sure however you're doing it you're having fun and enjoying it :)

[ghaff]

Mostly agree. Under the right conditions/use cases (and in the right hands of course) phones can take pretty nice photos--though I can't say most of those in the link you provided do a whole lot for me. For the majority of users, today's cameraphones are better than whatever mass market point and shoot they were using going back to the Instamatic days. With the exception of a few niches, there's little reason to buy a dedicated camera these days unless you're going interchangeable lens and learn how to use it--and make the effort to bring it with you.

And there is a generally annoying group of online gearheads who spend a lot more time obsessing about camera specs than they do going out and taking photos.

[nzealand]

Looks like he has upgraded to a 5s...

http://sasurau.squarespace.com/about/

It is a pity, there is something magical about the lomography look of a beat up 3Gs.

[jemfinch]

Bullshit.

Features like megapixels, 51 phase detection AF points, face detection metering and other goodies all allow real people to capture better, more memorable images than cell phone cameras.

1. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemfinch/8594571664/in/set-721... could not have been captured with a cell phone camera. I was holding my DSLR in my offhand and pushing him on the swing with my other hand.

2. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemfinch/9326415006/in/set-721... could not have been captured with a cell phone either. My wife was holding him and he was peeking out over her shoulder then switching to the other shoulder immediately when I brought the camera up. With a cell phone's shutter lag, he'd have been on the other side before the picture was taken.

3. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemfinch/8582319362/in/set-721... no cell phone camera in the world could have captured this in such low light so successfully.

4. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemfinch/9012492563/in/set-721... there are a hundred fleeting moments a day like this, and no cell phone in the world is fast enough to capture them.

It's easy to take a picture of an abandoned alley or cats lying on blacktop with a cellphone camera. Try doing that with a newborn's first smile, or a mischievous preschooler's momentary smirk.

[potatolicious]

Way to miss the point, which wasn't "a cell phone can do everything as well as a DSLR", which is objectively false, but rather that "what makes a great image has very little to do with technical ability".

I was going to do a point-by-point rebuttal on how every picture you've brought up can be taken with a cell phone camera, but that seems a wee bit pointless.

Instead look at those photographs and tell me what exactly makes them worthwhile. Is it the creamy smooth bokeh? The pin-sharp focus? The incredible low-light performance?

Or is it the fact that it's your child? Is it the human element - capturing someone in a moment of happiness, of vulnerability, or of peace?

This is the whole point of my rant before - all of this talk about sharpness, noise levels, autofocus points, etc etc, does nothing for what's in your image, and in the end that's what counts most (and what most people are worst at). It's light, it's subject, it's composition. Everything else is details - a compact point'n'shoot wouldn't give as much depth of field in photo #1, but who cares? A cell phone camera would have had a tad more noise in photo #3... but who cares?

No one. Except fellow pixel-peepers who get off on technical perfectionism. None of your relatives will even begin to think "wow, look at the smooth tones even in the shadows!", nor will you after a few weeks. I'm willing to bet that in a year or two, when your son is more grown, and you come back to this photo, you will not even begin to think about the technical aspects of it. Photography is so much bigger, more powerful than this.

A good photograph is 95% subject, composition, and light, and 5% technical mastery. It's nice to nail the last 5% sure, but there is altogether way too much noise being made about the 5% to the deafening silence about the 95%.

I'm willing to bet that if you took two identical novice photographers and gave them each $1,000, one who spends it on classes and books, and the other who spends it on gear, that the gearhead will have shown the least improvement in actual images (by a wide, wide margin) than the one who spent it gaining knowledge. This scales too - I'm willing to bet the effect is even more pronounced if you gave them each $10,000 instead.

The bottleneck, as always, is not the gear. It's the person behind it.

[jemfinch]

No, I didn't miss the point. Your point is wrong. You even (unwittingly) argue against it in another post of yours. Cartier-Bresson's "Man Leaping" could not have been captured with a cell phone camera. The shutter lag is just too bad. As another poster pointed out, "Tank Man" was taken from a half mile away.

> Instead look at those photographs and tell me what exactly makes them worthwhile. Is it the creamy smooth bokeh? The pin-sharp focus? The incredible low-light performance?

It's all of the above. When you remember events, you're not actually remembering the event itself: you're remembering the last time you remembered the event. The creamy smooth bokeh, the pin-sharp focus, etc. help me remember these events with more clarity and appreciation than I could otherwise. Every time you make the claim that technical quality doesn't matter, you're ignoring very fundamental cognitive science to the contrary.

You're claiming that "it's light, it's subject, it's composition", and while these are necessary conditions to capture good pictures, for millions upon millions of historic and sentimental potential pictures, they're not sufficient: better equipment leads to many, many better pictures than cell phones can provide.

[personZ]

Cartier-Bresson's "Man Leaping" could not have been captured with a cell phone camera. The shutter lag is just too bad.

Humorously, he didn't even see the man leaping, and wasn't timing for that. He took some shots, and it turned out to be a keeper. Such is exactly the nature of smartphone shots, as an aside -- people take countless shots, and among them some gems appear.

for millions upon millions of historic and sentimental potential pictures

This is where your argument falls apart. A modern smartphone has better image capture than SLRs -- top of the line SLRs --from just ten years ago. Despite your focus on shutter lag (where you can prefocus/expose on a smartphone just like an SLR, and then have a close to instant shutter), the shutter lag on current smartphones is, again, similar to top of the line SLRs of a few years ago.

With a large sensor and lenses, at any given time you'll always yield a better result (presuming you assume that such is always available when the moment arises). However at the core of photography, the technical side is far less important than it is held to be, and if we really need to bring up history, a modern smartphone was better than what the most committed photographer had in their arsenal not that long ago.

[judk]

"Light" is one of the reasons cheap SLR cameras are massively better than cell phones.

[theoh]

I think you are right, particularly since your focus is (at least partly) on capturing your kid for posterity rather than making impressionistic or abstract work.

There is, however, a marked tendency in photography to obsess about the technical. In the recent series of books "100 ideas that changed..." that also covers fields like art, graphic design, fashion, architecture and film, the photography book ("100 ideas that changed photography") is notable for its focus on technical developments. The other creative fields have their idiosyncrasies, and each book has a different editor, so this is hardly a well-designed study, but photography stands out as the most concerned with the purely technical. That seems to be just the way it is.

Nobody would suggest that wobbliness or "looking like its about to fall down" are good ideas for architecture, but for some reason people coming from the art world like the idea of messing with photography's technical perfection. Maybe it's a personality thing.

[personZ]

Your pictures hold importance to you for obvious reason, but your impression that they are the result of some sort of technical perfection of hardware is absurd. I see very similar photos, by the dozens if not hundreds, every day on Facebook. By people taking the photos with their iPhone, GS5, or whatever else they happen to have. Those "fleeting moments" when, exactly because they are fleeting moments, they grabbed what they have on their body 100% of the day.

I feel like this is a debate from 2008, discussing the camera on your new Blackberry.