Originally posted by SFTphotography Put it bluntly there is not one of them I would be proud to call mine and you can see varying degrees of technical deficiency. They're just snaps, and pretty shitty ones to be honest.
To put it bluntly you're trolling us, you decided before looking at them that you didn't like any phone pictures. If those exact same pictures had been posted in the Show us Your K-1 or K-3 Photos threads you'd have loved most of them.
---------- Post added 08-22-21 at 08:48 AM ----------
Originally posted by Rondec I don't really like most of those images. I am not sure I would like them any more if they were shot with an ILC either. Maybe a couple of them.
I don't think this is a gear issue. I certainly am not out buying new camera gear every chance I get. At the same time, when I shoot photos with my phone, I know how much better it would have looked if I had shot the same image on a tripod with a K-3 or K-1. And there are plenty of times where it is handy to have a wider lens than what your iphone has, or a longer lens, or one that has a faster equivalent aperture. Fokeh still looks kind of fake to me and I don't really like HDR any more, which is the cell phones answer to high dynamic range situations.
I don't think I'm a snob, but I mainly shoot with my cell phone for snap shots in situations where I didn't/couldn't bring my SLR along and I'm never super happy with them.
It's a silly argument to ask if a cell phone can stand up to a large print or pixel peeping compared to a good ILC image, especially one that plays to the ILC's strengths like birds or sports. Of course you can pull more out of an ILC's RAW files than a phone's in most cases. Someone who's good at post processing can get much more out of their files, and the ILC images will certainly look better at close inspection.
But I'll also say that in 2019 I took a family trip to Austria and Germany. My wife, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law only took pictures with their phones. I took the K-3 II and variety of lenses. We also took my K-30 and a kit lens and my then 11-year-old used that some of the time. When we came back I made a large photo book, with some images 14" on a side. I know, or I think I remember, which photos were taken with which. But no one else would. When I show the book to others who weren't on the trip not a single person made any comments about resolution, or dynamic range or anything else besides the subject of the photo. Sure, people oohed and ahhh'd over some shots of Neuschwanstein or the Austrian Alps taken with the K-3 II and a LTD lens, but they had no idea what camera or lens those were taken with. I picked and chose sizes to minimize the impact of resolution or other aspects of some of the cell phone shots, but they were seamlessly integrated into the story.
Also, I once posted a thread here asking people to identify two nearly identical photos of a car at the top of the Grossglockner High Alpine Road. One taken by me with a K-3 II and a 21mm LTD, one by my 11-year-old with the K-30 and kit lens. Nobody could really tell, the answers to the poll were indistinguishable from guessing.
And that's really the point. The cell phone (or the lesser ILC) allows you to tell a better story than just using your best camera. Even me, during the trip, took any number of photos with my cell phone because of a variety of reasons. I wasn't allowed to take the K-3 II to the soccer match. I didn't want to bring a whole camera kit walking to dinner, but there were many opportunities for pictures. The idea that all the cell phone pictures were all technically inferior to all the K-3 II shots, that's totally irrelevant. Except for people arguing on photos forums nobody cares, at all. What they care about is the story, the subject, the memories. Especially when the photos are good enough that no non-photographer even thinks twice about the tools used to capture the image.