An ode to Smartphone Photography
Gallery
iPhone:
4S/5/5S/6 Plus/7 Plus/X/<unknown>
Cameras, even in their earliest forms, have been intertwined with technology. From the early days of using chemicals to trap light on silver-coated plates inside lightproof boxes, to modern times of 100+ megapickle medium format monsters - cameras have both benefited from and contributed to technological progress.
Today, the smartphone stands as the pinnacle of that progress, for better or worse. And by association, the digital camera (and the act of photography itself) has come along for the meteoric ride that happens when you combine a computer with a camera.
My first smartphone was the Motorola Droid X. It kicked off a long-standing love and appreciation for Android that continues to this day (Proud dual-wielder of an Android and an iPhone). But the Droid X camera? Not great. Combine that with a pretty anemic selection of photo editing apps on the then “Android Market”, and you’ll understand why I jumped at the chance to switch to an iPhone when the 4S finally hit my carrier.
The iPhone 4S, with its 8 megapixel sensor, opened up a whole new world of mobile photography for me. I had my DSLR for “serious” work and my iPhone for everything else. Lightroom lived on my editing station, VSCO Cam on my phone - and together, those two made one powerful vibe machine.
I’m not shy about featuring smartphone photos in my portfolio. At first I had a separate gallery just for them but I’ve started incorporating the photos into my larger body of work as I now see the image, not the tool that made it. One of my favorite photos I’ve taken is a shot of a snow-covered forest, taken on an iPhone 4S from inside a moving vehicle (shown below). I don’t even have a high-resolution version anymore, just a small 960×950 .webp file. Like a digital equivalent of a Polaroid, that moment in time exists only as that tiny, imperfect artifact.
Early iPhones saw significant changes between generations in cameras, screen sizes and form factor, so I admit, I was young and dumb and upgraded every year for a few generations: 4S, 5, 5S, 6 Plus (I even camped out and took the day off work for this one 🙃)I skipped the 6S but got the 7 Plus and the iPhone X. I’ve watched smartphone photography evolve from the “toy camera” aesthetic, where goopy Instagram filters made up for a lack of technical image quality, to a world where computational photography bends the laws of physics to make a sensor the size of a fingernail simulate the output of a full frame camera. I have an iPhone 7 Plus photo I took of a pelican (shown below) that did a very convincing job of producing bokeh in the background and sharpness on the bird’s feathers to the point that when putting together images for this post I had to double check the exif data because I assumed I had taken the photo on my DSLR or Mirrorless camera.
I don’t want to be the jaded guy that says that the rise of computational photography in smartphones has taken some of the “magic” out of it, but I admit that I do not use the camera(s) on my iPhone 15 Pro Max like I did with the camera on the iPhone 5. My current phone photos consist of 95% documentary style, purely historical record purpose-images. While I appreciate the fact that every photo my phone takes is multiple frames stitched together to form the perfect representation of what Apple thinks my scene or subject and exposure should look like, it feels like it’s lost some of the raw edge, or doesn’t allow me to get an image I find interesting anywhere near as often. All these complaints can be directed at software and Apple’s camera system. I’ve been experimenting recently with Halide Process Zero on my iPhone and liking the results, but my favorite editing app VSCO has gone subscription based and it feels weird shooting RAW on a phone and editing photos from a smartphone in Lightroom. That’s my own hang up, though.
I’ve put together a few galleries showcasing my experience with smartphone cameras across the generations I’ve owned. Beware: photos may be overbaked. Light leaks on digital shots? You’re darn tootin’ I added those, and I stand on it too. Click or tap on any image to view it larger and in its original crop.
iPhone 4S
iPhone 5
iPhone 5S
iPhone 6 Plus
iPhone 7 Plus
iPhone X
<unknown>
These photos were taken on one of the cameras above, but the original files are gone. The photos are estimated to be taken between 2011-2013 in the iPhone 4S-5 era more than likely, but I can’t say for sure.
