3 reasons — Why I think professional photography is done
My iPhone is better than your 3k$+-DSLR — and no I’m not trying to hate on your profession or your gear.
I think professional (good) photography is like an amazing restaurant. If you’re extremely good at it, people love you for it. They pay tremendous amounts of hard earned dough (pun intended) for a plate with marginal amounts of deliciousness. But everyone can cook, restaurants are everywhere. People try, people fail. The same thing goes for photographers, if you are world class you shoot for Vogue or the big corporates— but other than that you have to accept the trying-part for years and tears.
Saying everyone with professional gear is a chef is just as insane as stating the same for a photographer. It’s not about the expensive stuff.
3 reasons: quality, context and efficiency.
You’ve probably heard people saying ‘the best camera, is the one you have in your pocket’. And I always have my iPhone with me. Always. Even when I need to bring a camera I bring my iPhone. In the beginning when the phones came with cameras on them, I used the big Canon DSLR. Now I don’t even bring the DSLR to trade shows / other work-related events and not even for photography for my blog / podcast or this post (see above).
The phone is more than good enough and much more efficient with apps like VSCO Cam than the DSLR with the SD-card (that doesn’t go in my MacBook 12’ anyway) with Photoshop / Lightroom. It’s much faster, directly connected to the internet and it makes the pictures that we are familiar with on the internet (I’ll explain later).
Is my phone better at taking photo’s in terms of absolute photo quality? No, but it makes pictures that do the job easily (context). And for all other parts, I think the iPhone just works better than the old-fashioned camera. Is your camera directly connected to Instagram (where the magic happens)? Dropbox (my work space)? I think not.
Burberry did a fashion show with the iPhone 5S in 2013
Yes, of course Burberry did this for publicity and for their friendship with Apple. But I love this case. Did you know that in 2015, the World Press Photo contest, handed out third price to a photo shot on an iPhone?
In my believe, this shows a shift in the demanding of photo / video quality. If you’ve grown up with the internet like me — you are used to crappy streams (even today), uploads and user content shot on phones. Now this is getting better with new / better phone cameras, larger audiences are checking out the phone-content (photo and video).
The printed magazine is gone in my life. The billboards are being replaced by 500-px banners for my generation and music isn’t coming from a CD anymore (you knew that already). Will there be a world for ‘real’ camera’s? Yes, of course. But they lost the (big) consumer market and are losing the prosumer market as well.
Can you imagine the professional market being replaced by phones as well? In 3, 5 or 10 years? Maybe, I don’t know. It took the iPhone less than 5 to replace my ‘professional’ camera. And I live somewhere between the consumer and the prosumer I guess.
Oh and if you think I was right, check out my Instagram for tons of iPhonegraphy ;-).
