Table of contents
🤖
AI-generated summary
The new iPhone 12 is out and all the fanboys are rushing to get one.
Like every year, Apple’s big mass has taken place, and like every year an “amazing” iPhone more beautiful and more powerful than all the others is presented.
On the menu this year: a design overhaul, since we now get a redesign every 3 years. A photo improvement and that’s it. That’s it? Yes, because the rest is just there to hide the big emptiness — or maturity, some will say — the maturity of smartphones that don’t really have much left to offer us, or else they’d cannibalize the sales of other products.
Photography for dummies 😒
Apple’s motto for the past few years has been photography. Not necessarily an Apple-exclusive motto, but at least it gives them something to bet everything on when new ideas 💡 run dry. I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth — it’s a good thing, it’s democratising a market that was, let’s be honest, previously reserved for a niche.
True, who can make sense of P, V, M mode without having paid a bit of attention to their camera?
Who has taken the time to organise their photos, who has never had the laziness to pull the photos off their memory card and save them to their computer?
I think a lot of us will recognise ourselves in that.
Does that bother me? Not at all — quite the contrary. What bothers me more is the blindness of some people in front of this marketing vomit 🤮 that makes them think they’ll be the best photographer in the world if they own the latest toy. It’s making people believe their photos can compete with professional work (I’m not a professional myself).
Have you ever tried to isolate a small object with an iPhone? The phone doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do — as long as it’s designed for a specific effect like portrait mode it can do incredible things 😻, but the moment you want to let your imagination run free, if Apple didn’t plan for it, your photo has a good chance of being a failure.
That’s the point I want to draw your attention to. Sure, the iPhone lets you take nice photos effortlessly, but they’ll look a lot like your neighbour’s. So before you say “I’m selling my camera gear,” ask yourself the right questions. Are you into photography for photography’s sake, or are you looking to take creative photos that stand out from the crowd?
A portrait mode that will never be perfect
Speaking of portrait mode — look at this photo, taken from the Big Sur presentation. Almost certainly shot on an iPhone, the portrait mode is awful 😤 — look at the hair, the out-of-focus areas in the foreground are appalling!
Point and shoot
If you’re looking for a phone to document your life, snap photos on the go, then yes, these technological advances make sense. Don’t fall into the “pro” trap the way Apple wants you to conceive it. An iPhone Pro has nothing professional about it — replace “Pro” with “Deluxe” and then yes, it makes more sense.
So thank you Apple and Google for having simplified taking photos, sharing, organising and even processing. I say processing because the amateur photographer does post-processing.
When you think about it, these tech giants haven’t just replaced cameras — they’ve replaced the complete photographer’s workflow. From taking the shot to sharing it, everything has been automated and simplified to the extreme for the average person.
I’ll end on this positive note, because yes — the majority of people who left their cameras gathering dust in the cupboard have been taking enormously more photos since smartphones arrived, and that’s a great thing!
Don’t forget: if you love photography, learn to use a camera and make it do what YOU want, not what someone decided it should do for you.
