iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

ALL photos look good with direct flash. Never use bounce flash. And indirect lighting is never flattering. EVER. Fire any photographer that ever uses bounce flash. Nobody wants their muddied color.

I was also a photo editor with thousands of photographer submissions. I can always tell which ones used bounce flash. A sure sign of unprofessional amateurness.

I get that people have a desire to maintain their lazy habits, but my job was to make sure they understood they sucked at photography.

“Specialist thinks the broader domain should universally adhere to the way things are optimized in their area of focus” is not an uncommon thing to see on HN, though its more commonly seen with specialists in different kinds of programming than photography.

If it's the former, take the time to understand not only your gear but also light and image processing (whether digital or film). If it's the latter, and you are a stickler for pixels get a digital camera, if not stick with the phone.

I'm interested in photography, but I won't buy a digital camera. My last film camera was a Minolta 700si (in the 90's) and a camera bag full of lens and flashes and other gadgets (filters shades etc), but was a far cry from the $10k professional camera with professional studio film processing. If you understand your gear, light, and how the images are going to be output (film or digital processing) you can get great images from whatever you are woking with.

Photography vs Photographs isn't about how many pixels a camera has or other limitations of a camera. It's what you do with it. Back in the day I preferred black & white film because I could control the entire processing cycle (I wasn't very good at color processing when the local camera shop could do it faster and better). Now I like the challenge of Photography with the limitations of a phone. Does that make it not "real" Photography? or not a real interest in Photography?

To me that where the difference is for "photography", a phone and dedicated digital camera are still digital. They are still processed and captured with the same medium, so learn it and understand it.

One might have greater ability to capture more light and thus not need the same amount of processing or setup, but it's still processed and produced from digital pixels. Both allow for any amount of post processing, but you have to know how to shoot with the device especially if there are more light capture limitations like a phone. If you just want photographs, put either in auto mode and you get what you get. Paying more for a dedicated camera just makes it easier to do, that doesn't make it "photography" over a more physically limited but still digital, phone camera.

If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.

The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.

Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.

The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.

But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.

(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)

For fisheye, I guess it would have been more accurate to say: the perspective distortion is present in both photos and is stronger for the iphone photo due to a shorter effective focal length, and there is no noticeable fisheye/barrel distortion in the iphone photo.