With how incredible high-end smartphone cameras have gotten, why do professional photographers and film makers still spend thousands of dollars on high end equipment instead of just using a high-end smartphone camera?
In: Technology
a high end smartphone camera is still, in most cases, a fixed lens with a very small sensor, no zoom, and no ability to control the amount of light it lets in. All the hard work of photography is done via math once the image is captured.
While you can control some of the things your smartphone camera does, what you see is often what you get, and if you want to change the focus from what your camera says your options are, or if you’re going for an effect your phone’s software doesn’t understand, you’re out of luck.
A high end digital camera has replaceable lenses, a larger sensor (meaning less distortion), and the lenses can be adjusted on the fly to let more or less light in by changing the size of the aperture or the shutter speed. Moreover, many of these settings can be changed with physical adjustments to the lens or by the camera’s physical controls. You rarely need to go into the menus, if ever.
I’ve seen some amazing images captured on a smartphone, and some absolute garbage shot with a DSLR. The trick is to know your device, know what it can and can’t do, and work within those constraints.
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