[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.