Phone Cameras

Now I know you’re probably thinking “does a phone camera really count as a camera?” And the short answer is ABSOLUTELY!  Despite the bad stigma phone cameras are capable of taking pretty incredible photos these days but that comes with some compromises. Unfortunately marketing spin on this genre of cameras can be a bit misleading. Billboards printed with ‘Shot on the iPhone X’ and beautiful images of portraits with blurry backgrounds can lead you to believe that phone cameras can do it all but the reality is that whilst they are getting a whole lot better every year, the physical size of these cameras means that many of the effects achieved are done with digital manipulation rather than using optics (the blurry backgrounds is a classic). Perhaps the most obvious example of this though is the fact that phone images always seem to come out of the camera looking similar to what your eyes are actually seeing in front of you. Shadow areas are balanced nicely against bright skies and colours are vibrant whereas most other cameras give you contrasty images where dark areas seem almost lost to black and bright skies are almost white.  These images look unbalanced and look average at best but we need to realise that this is because unlike the phone cameras these images have not been edited to within an inch of their life. Phone cameras are designed to edit your image before you actually get the view them (happens very fast) whereas dedicated cameras (non-phone) don’t do this editing process for you. This makes them look worse on the back of the camera screen but gives them much more information to work with when doing the editing process on the computer yourself.

Apart from the editing and software gimmicks though phone cameras have one other major limitation: zoom & wide angle. Phone cameras usually come with several lenses these days ranging from ‘wide angle’ to ‘portrait’ zoom but if you’re wanting to use a different zoom range other than your built in lenses allow you either need to use digital zoom (cropping) or clip-on lenses.

All is not lost for the humble phone camera though as they are actually amazing for capturing ‘memories’ and ‘moments’. They are always with you, are simple to use, take pretty good quality images and are the perfect camera for the ‘happy-snapper’ (no it’s not a dirty word). I use my phone all of the time to take photos that I know I don’t want to edit or use for big prints etc. It’s convenient and simple enough to use, even after a few glasses of wine.