GoKawiilIn my roundup of what I saw as the 11 key AI features announced by Apple at this year’s WWDC, I said that the camera features seemed extremely well thought through.
In the two weeks since, my view has been very much reinforced. The Clean Up tool is now significantly more powerful, while the Reframe and Extend tools address similar real-life needs …
Photography is changing
I got my first camera as a birthday present at the age of 14. It was a Zenit-E, a Soviet-era Russian hunk of metal that weighed about as much as a car and had exactly zero electronics or automatic features.
Technically, it had a built-in light meter, but this was a Selenium one that could just about measure the difference between a pitch black room and being pointed directly at the sun. An external light meter was needed, and every exposure had to be manually configured. It was ugly, heavy, and clunky – and I absolutely adored it.
If you’d told me then that I would one day be using a phone as my primary camera, and getting far higher quality results than even much later SLRs, I would have enquired as to your use of recreational chemicals. And yet here we are.
It would have seemed just as unimaginable a decade ago to talk about DSLRs being discontinued, even in the pro market. And yet Nikon has ceased manufacturing them altogether, and while Canon keeps making existing models, it hasn’t developed a new one in years and likely never will again. Mirrorless cameras dominate the market, with industry surveys showing this to be true even among professionals.
We may not yet see many professional photographers routinely using iPhones for their shoots, but it’s certainly common for them to be praised for their capabilities. Today’s iPhones are pretty serious cameras.
The rise of computational photography
Of course, there’s only so much you can do with tiny sensors and plastic lenses. You don’t, for example, get very much control over depth of field.
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