Westminster Bridge at Night

Westminster Bridge at Night
Taxi pickup on Westminster Bridge, London

Saturday 23 February 2019

Mobile Phone Cameras

I'm not intending to rant, so if this comes out as such, I apologise.

In case you are unfamiliar with one of my particular prejudices, let me tell you what I think of Phone Cameras.

Not much.

It doesn't matter what electronic wizardry you pack inside the things, how much editing software you include (in what is supposed to be a phone) to con an increasingly gullible and materialistic public into spending unrealistic and obscene amounts of money, at the end of the day, they have:

(a) lenses and sensors which are smaller than and old-fashioned toothpaste cap.
(b) screens which you can't see properly in anything other than pitch darkness.
(c) the most awkward camera controls ever invented.
(d) a huge attractiveness to morons.

In the photographic food chain, mobile phone cameras are, in my opinion, plankton.

But that's not to say that they don't have their uses.
Stitching up innocent people for example.
Turning the world into 1930s Nazi Germany by recording everyone's slightest movement and reporting it to anyone who will listen so that all right-thinking PRIVATE citizens live in fear of so much as breathing at the wrong time...

Well anyway. Back to topic.

Yes, they do have their uses, as this picture shows. Sunsets wait for no-one and if the phone is the only camera you have handy, then they fill a gap.


f/1.9  ----  1/500 sec  ---  ISO 40  ---  3.6mm

ISO 40? Even my DSLRs can't get ISO 40 at f1.9! But then, with decent size lenses letting in a proper amount  of light, they don't need to.

Still. It was an amazing sunset, worth capturing.
 
 
But don't be fooled. This picture took a fair deal of post production, just to bring the drab in-camera image back to something approaching the glorious scene I was trying to record. It'll do, but that's about all, in my opinion.

There are some very skilled people who produce some incredible shots using phone cameras. And I say, "Congratulations and Respect to them."
But for every one of those, there are hundreds of know-nothings who get lucky once in a lifetime. And for every one of those, there are millions upon millions whose useless talentless dross chokes social media and other platforms.
"Photographs" which, in the days of film (remember the Kodak Instamatics?) would either have been returned from the lab with a "Low Quality" sticker on them or been consigned to the bin. Or more likely, and more to the point, not taken in the first place.

It is the mobile phone camera, and its easy accessibility to everyone with a thumb, whether they know the front of a lens from the back end of bullshit or not, that has largely reduced the position in society of the serious photographer, (amateur or professional) to no more than dubious eccentricity.

These days, to film everything at random and invade everyone's privacy with a mobile phone is normal and even acceptable, whilst creating a carefully framed shot, recording a good-quality image for posterity using skills and experience gained over years with top quality equipment is likely to get you labelled as some sort of pervert.

And that, as you might have guessed, pisses me right off!

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