Mobile Phone Photography "Phoneography"
Why I "Joined the Club"
As Mobile Phones, both Android and iPhone, have become more and more powerful, so has their ability to capture great photographs and truly extraordinary video. At the same time, the limitations of the necessarily small sensors used in mobile devices have been largely overcome by the naissance of a whole range of truly professional and capable capture and editing software which brings "traditional" professional-grade post processing to this new mobile platform.
In fact so capable has this platform become that a number of feature films have been shot entiirely on iPhones - Sean Baker's "Tangerine" (iPhone 5s), Steven Soderberg's "Unsane" (iPhone 7) are just 2 examples of these full length feature films - and the industry standards for film post production have become software applications such as Final Cut Pro X (from Apple) and DaVinci Resolve Studio (from Blackmagic Design) both of which are available for less than $300! (in fact a full featured version of DaVinci Resolve is FREE!)
So if these tools are good enough for the "big boys" then they are certainly good enough for me, and I have begun experimenting with them. I confidently expect the mobile phone to become my photography grab and shoot "tool of choice" and I intend to fully explore the exciting new world (for me) of video and drone photography, whose possibilities are endless, especially here in the exceptional beauty of Costa Rica.
All this also makes sense for another reason. These days people view and share their photographs increasingly on the small screen, videos and movies as well. Gone seem to be the days of the average consumer printing their memories and sticking them in albums - it's all mostly digital now in our "sharing" world. So the need for large sensors such as are found by necessity in more traditional DSLR or Mrrorless type cameras from Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji, Leica, Panasonic and the like, is largely confined to those commercial professional (and amateur) photographers who have a need to print very large and thus require very high resolution sensors with larger pixels to gather more light.
For the many enthusiatic photographers, the increasingly and extraordinarily capable Smart Phone cameras and their attendant software can do just about anything (but not quite all...yet!) their "bigger brothers" can do . After all, the best camera there is, is the one you have with you!
I invite you to follow along with me on these pages as I explore this exciting "new" medium.
Take a look at the In My Bag page to see my Mobile Phone rig.
Cheers!
