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Comment by AndrewThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

There is no doubt my mother-in-law barely notices a difference when I take a photo of her grand children using phone and using camera. And this is for one simple reason - she looks at how much fun her grand children are having. Not the quality of HDR or anything else.

So your point really stands here.

However for anybody just a little bit involved the difference is huge. Simple things like depth of field can only be faked on small sensor because if physics.

HDR on phones also often look fake, imperfect and artificial. To the point that I think in 50 years people will try to fake it to get that "2020 look" as nowadays we try to get "film look of 60s".

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> depth of field

I know I'm a weird person, but I never got the whole depth-of-field/bokeh thing. While I understand that some people want the "focus" to be the sharp center of attention, and perhaps other things to be less sharp, I never liked the "everything except the main object is super blurry" effect. In many cases, I want everything to be in focus so I can choose what to look at and enjoy.

As for HDR look, it's a bit difficult to say what neutral/normal is since it depends on SO many variables (including the brain of the viewer). So I would argue that your perception of the "fakeness" of phone HDR is because your mind is trained on images which look different. Even if there is a formal correct definition of ideal, in cases of relatively small differences it's kind of moot.

Plus, at my basic understanding I believe photogs shooting in raw are choosing to some degree how to interpret the data when they convert from RAW. Maybe they let the default converter choose, and maybe (probably) they make some choices of their own. So at this point there is no truth. There is just the subjective choices of the operator.

Even between camera/lens/software choices the results can be quite varied from what I've seen reading many camera tests, reviews, and comparisons.

Ultimately a human with a little training or some intuition/luck can make choices of how and where to shoot which probably have the greatest overall impact on the likeability of the image.

In many cases, I want everything to be in focus so I can choose what to look at and enjoy.

At the end of the day all these choices boils down the argument of photographer as artist vs photographer as documenter. The artists goal is to essentially decide what part they want you to focus on and how you should experince the scene so that they can elicit the emotional response they want. The documenter wants to show you as accurately and neutrally as possible what the actual scene looked like when the picture was taken. Which one you prefer is entirely dependant on what you think the purpose of a photograph should be.

I agree. Bokeh has come to be the standard because a) it used to be difficult to achieve, you needed expensive lenses and b) all the photographers said it is great. No layperson I have taken pictures of really liked the background blur effect. Most of them wanted the background to be in the shot.

We use a limited depth of field for a few reasons. One is that even at f/8 on a decently long lens with a large sensor it’s still going to happen, and you’re not going to be at f/8 in a dimly lit environment.

The main reason is to draw your eye to the subject instead of the background. It’s also how our eyes work.

The third (related) reason is that the background often isn’t super controllable. If I’m taking portraits of someone in the woods I don’t want branches “coming out” of their heads, and those branches being blurry helps with that. At weddings if I’m photographing candids of a group of people blurring out everyone but the subject(s) is handy because people often make stupid faces. And don’t get me started on how messy bridal suites are where the girls are getting ready…

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