Tom Collins' Photo Journal: Cell Phone Photography

I am one of the deniers of using cell phone cameras as a legitimate tool for photography. And I was wrong. They are legitimate and they're really pretty good and they're a whole lot of fun. And of course there's the old adage about the best camera is the one you have with you.

Recently, and I know I'm late to the game, I've decided to take my iPhone 5s a little more seriously and give it a real try and a workout to see if I could actually get away with using it on an outing.

iPhone 5s with edits in Lightroom 5.5

I loaded up a few camera apps and a few editing apps and set out to take some pictures. What I found out and came back with was surprising in a good way and has changed the way I do a few things.

First of all I'm a complete amateur. I love photography as a hobby and I'm involved with it almost constantly. I really love gear too. I've been through lots of cameras from Nikon and Canon to Leica and Fuji. I used to love the big DSlrs and the myriad of lenses and bags and filters and flashes and tripods. Then along came the micro four thirds and the mirror-less generation and improvements have been steadily coming down the road. Camera manufactures continuously improve their cameras in tiny increments and make the weakest amongst us constantly upgrade to the newer, bigger, better and faster. Camera sales could not possibly have ever been better than they have been for these past 10 years or so.

Now cell phone manufactures have moved into the playing field in a big way and have all but killed the small compact digital camera market.

iPhone 5s edits in Lightroom 5.5

It's no wonder either, with some cameras boasting huge megapixels and glass lenses on a device that is already in your pocket where ever you go anyway, why bother to drag yet one more device along.

So now I've decided to give my iPhone a real try. I've decided that for it to be serious I needed a good "camera app" and after trying several different ones found the built in one and Camera + to be the best. For editing apps I've gotten

iPhone 5s edits in Snapseed
I thought the performance here was surprisingly
good since the lighting was a little
difficult and no flash was used.

the most use out of Snapseed and find it the most pleasing to use with the best results. I've also tried iPhoto and although I'm just getting familiar with it I kind of like it. I've tried several others, like FilterStorm but for my purposes and my thinking of cell phone photography it and a few others were just to complex for use on a small handheld device.

The secret to it all, for me, is that it has to be easy and fast. So far I've found the results to be favorable but not great for the discerning photographer. For the casual snap-shooter, which I am frequently, it's fine. Lets face it, most of our work, our photos, end up somewhere in digital format on the web or on a slideshow on your T.V. For photos that only get to screens I've found the cell phone to be a suitable and handy camera. I know there are now galleries around the globe that feature "mobile photography" artists and I've seen some of what they do and it is amazing. For me any work I do and want to take seriously and possibly print in a large format, mat and frame, I'll need a bigger sensor. However I did just make an 8x10 glossy print of an iPhone photo and it looked amazing.

But for cell phone cameras that are doing things really well these days, and most likely will only get better, cell phone photography can be taken seriously and a lot of fun can be had. I don't much care for all the filters that are available in many of the apps that are out there however for many they can not only be a lot of fun they can dress up a cell phone photograph that isn't as perfect as you might like it to be and make it look good. The true cell phone artists out there are making incredible images using nothing more than their phone and a few apps.

My workflow was important for me to develop as well. Since my theory here revolves around this being mobile (read fast and on the move) I want it to be easy and straight forward. Shoot, edit, share. So my workflow goes something like this: Take the image and have it saved to my Camera Roll; Open Snapseed and make any necessary edits and save it back to my Camera Roll and Share. Done. Let me say too that I do not intend in any way to diminish anyone who has chosen to take this genre of photography seriously. I get it. It's really awesome and organizations like Mobile Photography Awards proves this point clearly. But as an amateur myself I'll only be interested, for now, in this genre as a fun, quick and easy way to shoot and share pretty decent photos.

iPhone 5s edits in Lightroom 5.5

So is it a serious tool? I have to say yes. Is it for everyone? Probably not. Will it be something I do more of in the future? For sure. From what I hear the next IOS update (IOS 8) from Apple will include upgrades to the camera that will give full manual control with things like aperture, ISO and shutter speed control. That will make these little pocket cameras even more amazing.

Many of our camera phones today are capable of images that are much better than what some of the great photographers in our history were capable of with their cameras and certainly much better than many or most of the early digital point shoot cameras. So use your phone in the same way you would use your camera. Be thoughtful with your compositions, lighting and subject and shoot away.

Thanks for following along,

Tom