The bunch of unpleasant questions

Despite all that questions: Will you be a part of the future and have fun, nevertheless?

Article pubilshed on 2021/07/04
This post is assigned to the categories: Nature shots, Profound

I promised you in the last posts to return to the roots again, which’s nature photography.

This blog wouldn’t be this blog if unpleasant topics were not addressed again and again. Unpleasant especially for you photographers out there! Get ready for the truth: Let us talk about smartphone photography.
What if I told you that all of the recently released pictures were taken with a smartphone.
Dramatic pause.
Pweh! Just a joke, of course. Something like that could never happen to a man of principles like me. Shocked the reader twice already, check.
But seriously, smartphone cameras are getting better and better. So it’s not that absurd thinking about the question to what extent real cameras will still have a right to exist in the future.
And that would explain why this article is so discomforting for particularly proud photographers.

But how can that happen?
A real camera including a large sensor and a high-quality lens must have an advantage over the smartphone from a physical point of view alone, right? Multi-coated glass with a corresponding size and weight justify strong prices, after all.
Why are modern smartphone images then becoming harder and harder to distinguish from professional images? The answer’s software.
While cameras still shoot pictures, smartphones calculate them. This compensates for physical disadvantages. The software recognizes hair in portrait mode, for example, and sharpens it instantly. Skies are darkened, foregrounds are separated and exposed, colors get saturated.
Everything is based on advanced algorithms.
Whereas cameras write the data from the sensor more or less directly onto a memory card, smartphones involve a number of calculations and processing steps on the way to the memory. However, this is only possible because processors and other hardware have evolved.
Even the preview after opening the camera app in the smartphone is calculated precisely at that very moment. The image information provided by the smartphone’s actual lens would be far too poor for this. You can watch the complex calculations live so to speak.

You can think what you want about it, this fact is nothing but impressive. Just imagine the same software being used in professional cameras.

That results in several questions: Does it still have anything to do with photography?
Will professional cameras become obsolete?!
Who knows what the future holds, but one thing is certain: Technology is going to continue evolving. So the right question is: Will you be a part of it and have fun, nevertheless?!

I mentioned above that I am a man of principles. One of them principles is that published images must come from real cameras on that website.
At this point, however, an exception had to be made. The picture above was actually taken with a smartphone. As a proof of concept so to speak.
Where this one picture comes from, there are six more to see. Be sure to check all of them all out.

What I want to emphasize: My current smartphone is neither modern, quite the opposite, nor is it from a leading brand. Would you’ve been able to tell a difference?
And what would have been possible with the latest technologies?