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Comment by psychomugs | Hacker News Reader

Wim Wenders had some pretty strong words about phone photography, claiming it's no longer photography but a new medium itself [1].

"The less you have, the more creative you have to become."

In On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that photography, which itself took a while to become considered an art form, gradually began to absolve painting of its duty to represent 'reality.' I can see 'phonetography' doing the same: dedicated photojournalists with dedicated cameras are losing ground to amateurs with just a phone and social media account.

Painting didn't die and neither will photography, but it's definitely going through some sort of midlife existential crisis. I can see it doing the equivalent of buying a vintage roadster as a senior citizen, i.e. return to its youthful state (film and mechanical/chemical processes) and explore its own unturned stones.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ezzpuOqkX4

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I also a return to analog in some who have grown up with cameras in their phones.

I guess the experience of only having 24 pictures and developing becomes meaningful/ interesting when you are used to unlimited and direct.

Great art comes from limitations. As Spielberg said, if he had access to CG when he made Jaws the shark would've been in every frame.

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." - Orson Welles

> I can see it doing the equivalent of buying a vintage roadster as a senior citizen

Funny you should put it this way, because it’s the same crowd buying both: wealthy old guys. Some time around the 1990s, Canon and Nikon made the fateful decision that photography would become stupid expensive and accessible only to those with money to burn. Don’t get me wrong, modern DSLRs and AF lenses are amazing feats of engineering and manufacturing, but the end result has been that “serious” photographers spend upwards of $10k on a nice body and not that much glass. You reap what you sow. All of the energy and excitement about taking pictures now surrounds phones. The idea of dropping $thousands on a “proper” DSLR setup probably seems laughable to most millennials and gen Z.

I think anyone, even millennials and gen z, that gets serious about photography will quickly start to find the deficiencies of their phone camera. Sure, there is a lot you can do with a phone. Even some stuff you can't do well with a dedicated camera. But everyone who really gets into the craft starts to see that they can't quite get the shot they want I'm the lighting they want with a single, one size fits all device.

It's not clear to me how long that will hold. Maybe it will hold forever. But, I can certainly imagine my iPhone45 or Pixel53 will take say 100k frames per second so in 1/250th of a second they could take 400 images in a wide angle or multiple angles and then through computational photography reproduce almost any image that a current high DSLR could take at almost any lighting with almost any focus, after the fact.

I don't think that's possible.

There are physical limitations we're already bumping into. A lens can only have a limited resolution. It's pointless to make a sensor that's got more pixels than the lens can produce. The amount of light coming in is limited, and the sensor can't gather more than 100% the light.

A sensor has a quantum efficiency stat, which tells you how likely is it that a photon will turn into an electron and be measured, and IIRC it already hovers at around 50% for most cameras, which means at the very best you can gather twice the amount of light before running into a wall. In photographic terms that means a maximum improvement of one f-stop.

An improvement that still could be had is a good Sigma Foveon-style sensor with stacked sensors. This in the ideal case would give you two extra f-stops (due to the lack of a bayer filter), and improve color accuracy. Foveon still doesn't perform well enough on ISO to compete well though.

So at this point we can make near perfect glass and near perfect sensors. What's left is basically playing around with the tradeoffs -- do you want to sacrifice resolution for bit depth, or bit depth for resolution? How about medium and large format? This by the way means that a big dedicated camera will always be better than a phone because it will have a bigger lens and a bigger sensor, and can do the same software tricks the phone can.

This stuff has always interested me but I've never done a deep dive into the science; do you have any recommended readings?

Maybe phones will become a new arbitrary standard like 135 film was. Modern APS-C sensors and larger will be dubbed 'Large Format,' something of interest only to enthusiasts but meaningless to the average consumer.

I'm afraid not offhand, I'm a hobbyist in the area and picked up a bunch of stuff from here and there.

But, "APS-C" won't become known as "large format". Those terms are already in use in photography and already hold specific meanings, even if there's some wiggle room. Micro four thirds is the smallest serious size, still far bigger than what a cell phone can have, APS-C is the consumer DSLR size, full frame matches the size of 35mm film, and it goes further to medium format and large format. Medium format is already quite specialized at starts at $5K, and large format is extremely specialized territory and not for normal people.

Yes, I meant large format relative to phones and layusers and as a marketing gimmick, like Nikon's 'DX' line which sounds premiumly large but is actually APS-C. The filmic 'large format' needed 'medium format' to become 'large.'

I'm sure you know more than me but I can't help but remember all the people who said 1200baud, or 9600baud the fastest the copper wires in my phone line could ever physically handle. Well, my house still has the same wires but somehow they are magically magically handling > 1gig connections.

To be fair, there are also lots of things you can only do with a phone camera, like have it on you at all times like a visual notepad.

One of my favorite books is Jerry Hsu's The Beautiful Flower is the World, a collection of phone pictures brilliantly juxtaposed to tragicomedic effect [1]. NYC street photo grandmaster Jeff Mermelstein now only uses his phone, to take pictures of other peoples' phones [2]. It's an interesting parabolic trajectory where the 'better' you get, the 'worse' your equipment can be, almost like how 'bad' fashion is an ironic indicator of 'good' fashion sense.

[1] https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2019/09/book-review-the-b...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-photograph...

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