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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. |
> 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.