It’s quite a good camera
I came across an interesting article the other day in the New Yorker. In it Craig Mod said two things that stuck in my mind. The first was that the iPhone’s viewfinder was great for portraits. Of course! I said to myself, mentally slapping myself on the forehead. Taking pictures of people with the iphone camera means you can carry on looking them in the eye and they can carry on interacting with you as a normal person, not a person with a piece of kit covering half their face. So, in portrait photography, we’ve progressed from a man (and it usually was) in the late nineteenth century hiding himself under a dark blanket to take a photo, to one where he (or she) takes the picture holding a small piece of equipment in their hand, away from their body and their face in full view of the subject. Having a large viewfinder also makes it easier to compose your shot. I’ve taken photos surrounded by other very serious photographers using serious bits of kit and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of them use the screens on the back of their cameras as a viewfinder. I think the action of looking through the screen on the back is too closely associated in their minds with amateurs, so they don’t do it. Even if it might actually help them compose their picture better.
The second was that editing or processing on the screen is a very tactile experience. He likened it to the old days of developing photos by putting them in chemical trays and then poking them around until you got something you liked. And I’ve often thought that the process of editing a photo on the iPhone screen is very much like painting. A dab here, a tiny touch there. And I know a lot of graphic artists use the iPhone and the iPad in this way. Editing photos this way is certainly easier than clicking with a mouse in Photoshop.
Many people have talked about two of the iPhone camera’s strengths being that it is unobtrusive and always with you. And here are two more advantages that we perhaps hadn’t articulated before. I recently bought my iPhone 5S off the shelf for hard cash (quite a lot of it) rather than as part of a phone deal, so I’ve started thinking of it as a real camera. Which, as Craid Mod points out, it is. Quite a good one.
Tactile
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