A lot of photographic inspiration often comes from nature. Last week I was walking in a park a few hours after the torrential “100 year storm”, and noticed that all the twigs lying on the ground had been washed down the grassy hill, forming these clumps of miniature log-jams. They were just a lot of fun from a artistic viewpoint, showing again that nature truly knows how to do randomized, chaotic art.
It’s funny when someone says a photograph is beautiful, because not everyone will have the same perception. This is because the idea of beauty is a very subjective one. Beauty is a term which cannot truly be quantified in any real manner. What society has done is imprint certain standards of beauty based on a few peoples opinions. If you look at the picture of the pink flower below, you might say it’s beautiful – but why is it beautiful? Is it because most people would say that, or is it because it is colourful. A brown flower would likely be considered not-so-beautiful. Is it because the flower smells nice? (which obviously you cannot tell from a photograph). The second flower below, a Frangipani is simpler, but may be beautiful because of its decadently sweet, floral, fragrance. Could beauty be an amalgam of visual and olfactory senses?
For most of human existence, beauty has not really mattered that much (well, except maybe for those who had wealth, I mean gold is shiny, which likely contributes to its allure). Most humans were concerned with survival. That is not to say that aesthetics did not play a role in the things they made, but let’s face it, catching food took precedence over making things look pretty. Beauty may have existed more in the natural world. In fact it may be these natural patterns that exist in nature that has lead to humans being somewhat hardwired to experience beauty.
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.”
Hume, David, “Of the Standard of Taste”, Essays Moral and Political, p.136 (1757)
Beauty has to do with the idea of aesthetics, which is essentially the appreciation of beauty. The term “aesthetics” was introduced in 1750 by German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten who defined taste, in its wider meaning, as the ability to judge according to the senses, instead of according to the intellect. When we say something is beautiful, we are expressing an aesthetic judgment. When you pick a raspberry from a bush, you tend to choose the bright red, firm raspberries, with no apparent visual defects, those that are most beautiful (of course these is nothing to say they will taste good from pure visual assessment alone).
Beauty can be objective and universal, as certain things are beautiful to everyone. Perhaps flowers are a good example, or things in the natural world. However beauty in the human-made world is more subjective and individual. It is no different with our other senses. A delicious food to some, may taste repugnant to others. Another good example is art. Some people can find a piece of art beautiful, while others find it loathsome. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. Each person’s perception of beauty is also influenced by their environment. In 1951 artist Robert Rauschenberg produced White Painting, basically white latex house paint applied with a roller and brush on two canvas panels. Some will find beauty in this nothingness, many won’t (well because there is nothing there).
The same is true of photographs, where beauty truly is subjective, mainly because photographs inherently represent the visual perspectives of the photographer, not necessarily those of the viewer. In some cases what is viewed in a photograph may not have the same beauty as the scene in real life, perhaps due to the lack of depth (i.e. flatness), or the misinterpretation of colour. In other cases, the photograph tells a different story of beauty to the real world. For instance colour may not be quintessential to beauty. The absence of colour in B&W images is not to everyone’s taste, yet it helps to tell a story in a way that means the colour does not distract the viewer from the image’s inner beauty, perhaps highlighting the expressions and textures of the scene.
There are many elements to producing a beautiful photograph, but at the end of the day, beauty is very much tied to the perceptions of the viewer. And unlike the physical world where we can harness all out senses to decipher our understanding of beauty, in visual media we have only our eyes.
When it comes to “who invented what first” in the photographic industry, there is always a lot of discussion when it comes to German patents. For example the idea that the Contax S had the first pentaprism for 35mm SLRs is based on a early patent. But just because a patent existed somewhere didn’t mean that similar technology wasn’t being developed elsewhere in parallel. And concepts don’t always make it to reality.
During the Second World War, German companies often applied for patents in other European countries, such as France and Switzerland. France made somewhat sense, considering it was mostly occupied by Germany during the war. Why this was done is still up for debate, but the end result is that there are often patents for photographic objects which exist outside Germany, but no longer have an associated German patent (for whatever reason). For example, information on the the precursor to the Spiegel-Contax (Contax S) camera, the Syntax, which was designed during the war, is available by means of a French patent FR884054 filed on August 9, 1941. The patent is supposedly based on a German utility patent filed on August 23, 1940, however a search of German patents finds nothing. Is that because it never existed, was never processed, or was lost? (The non-German patents normally identify that they are based on a German patent, however no German patent numbers are provided). It was also possible that during a war economy, only inventions that were important to the war effort were granted, many as so-called “secret” patents.
A patent is only effective within the scope of the respective patent law. Companies therefore register patents abroad in order to protect their inventions there from unauthorized imitation. In most cases during the war, these patents were confiscated. For example with the “Patents, Designs, Copyright and Trade Marks (Emergency) Act, 1939” of September 21, 1939, the British began confiscating enemy patents. Other Allied countries undoubtedly enacted similar laws.
The fate of German patents in the period 1945-1950 is somewhat interesting. According to the German Patent and Trademark Office, in 1944 due to the bombings, large portions of the patent office in Berlin (some 250-320K volumes were moved to the town of Heringen, and stored in a 500m deep potash mine shaft. The town was occupied by U.S. troops on 3 April 1945, and the shaft was located, although the patents were not exactly in great shape, and likely would have disintegrated if brought to the surface. So a team was sent down the mineshaft to microfiche the patents. Other patents were dispersed throughout Germany, and supposedly one set of copies of 180,000 patent applications were taken into eastern Germany where they were later lost by fire. Now the U.S. were actively engaged in tracking down secret documents from the industrial and research community. This involved 17 U.S. industries, and hundreds of civilian investigators. They discovered vacuum tubes made of heavy porcelain, magnetophone tape, and infrared technologies.
Starting in July 1945, U.S. troops seized some 145,000 “non-concluded” patent files. Essentially nearly all the German patents ended up in West Germany, meaning that the companies in East Germany likely no longer had access to the protection of these patents. Quite a number of the patents seized were used to help industries in allied countries. Why were not more photographic patents used? The allied countries really didn’t have the same level of photographic industry as Germany. Most German camera/lens companies actually ended up in the Soviet occupation zone. In addition, it is likely the main company in the Western zone, Leitz, had enough pull to allow it to continue operating.
In addition, from the end of April 1945 until 1 October 1948 there was no facility to file patents, aka the “patent-office-free-period” when no patents could be filed. Germans in the western zones were able to file patents again on 1 October 1948 and the German Patent Office began operations on 1 October 1949. In East Germany, patents could be submitted again on 15 September 1948, and on 6 September 1950, the Office for Inventions and Patents of the GDR was established.
What about the old patents which had basically been neutralized? Well in West Germany, the provisions on the maintenance of old IP rights were covered by the “First Act on the Amendment and Transition of the Provisions in the Field of Industrial Property Protection” of 8 July 1949. A request to maintain the IP rights had to be filed by 30 September 1950. A similar act appeared in East Germany in 1950. An example is one of Zeiss’s patents for pentaprisms from 15.4.1942: “Z 679 IXa/42 h ‘Spiegelprisma mit konstanter Ablenkung’ ” – basically a version of the 1946 Swiss patent, CH241034. It was reapproved on 14 June, 1951 (DE000Z0000679MAZ). Note that the 1942 patent does not appear in the German Patent Office searchable database.
It is therefore possible to find some patents, but others were likely lost in the attempt to save them during the tail end of the war. So the idea of defining who invented something first during the 1940s in Europe, but in particular Germany is very challenging, as noted in my post on Who had the first 35mm SLR with a pentaprism? Having said that it is generally easy to find historic patents from countries like Germany, Switzerland, and France. It is much harder to find them from Italy, or even Belgium.
This past covers more aspects of buying a vintage camera in FAQ form. When it comes to 35mm interchangeable-lens cameras there are two categories: rangefinder and single-lens-reflex (SLR). This FAQ is concerned with SLRs because they became the dominant form of SLR camera found on the used market.
Identifying the best vintage camera is very much a subjective thing. Unlike lenses though, which are often chosen for the aesthetic appeal they impart upon photographs, cameras are all about functionality. All cameras really serve the same purpose, as a vessel to hold the lens, and film, and control the process of taking a photo. So the best vintage cameras are often those that achieve this in a way that doesn’t compromise functionality. They should be simple to use, aesthetically pleasing, ergonomic, and don’t suffer from a series of maladies, e.g. shutters that could imminently fail, poor engineering or manufacture etc.
It really depends on what sort of features are required, and perhaps what sort of lens mount (not all lens mounts are inter-compatible, and it is hard to find adapters for film cameras). Do you want fully manual, semi-automatic, or fully electronic? Do you want a built-in light meter (which is tricky because many don’t work anymore)? Then you have to figure out which ones are problematic from some functional viewpoint, e.g. problems with shutters, or flaky electronics. For example Olympus made 14 major models of manual focus SLR in the period 1972 until 2002, and two automatic models. The OM-707 was an auto-only camera, and somewhat of a disaster from a usability perspective. The Olympus OM-4Ti (1986-2002) is considered by many to be best film SLRs money can buy.
In reality, M42 is likely the most common lens mount, at least up until the early 1970s. There were a lot of lenses made for this mount from a myriad of manufacturers. There were also a bunch of cameras that used it as the mount. Next in line might be the Exakta mount.
Unlike mirrorless digital cameras, which have a short focal flange distance, allowing for adapters to suit a bunch of 35mm film lenses, the same is not true for film cameras. Some cameras can use lenses with other mounts, many can’t. For example the Minolta cameras with an SR-mount can use M42 mount lenses, because the flange distance on the camera (43.50mm) is less than that of the lens, allowing an adapter to convert the M42 to SR-flange (MD,MC) – however the opposite is not true.
Yes. Some people love how cameras look, even if they don’t function that well. Form over function is a real thing for some people, of course beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.
Sometimes cameras didn’t sell that well, and as a result weren’t that successful. This was usually down to poor choices in the design of the camera. A good example is Rollei which had its own bayonet mount lens system known as the QBM – proprietary lens mounts means a smaller choice of lenses. Poor usability, or finicky mechanical features often lead photographers to abandon a camera. Sometimes it can be poor aesthetics, as with the case of the Minolta Maxxum 7000, although to be honest requiring photographers to dump all their lenses in favour of a new system with autofocus, probably wasn’t the best idea.
There are three major categories of vintage camera manufacturers. The first are landmark manufacturers who got into the game early, and focused heavily on SLRs. They likely had a start in 35mm rangefinder cameras. This means manufacturers like Exakta, Asahi-Pentax, Nikon, and Canon. Pentax is the only one of the three that did not produce rangefinder cameras. Next are the companies that are second tier, i.e. they had a smaller footprint, made only SLRs or got into the game late. This includes Konica, Minolta, Fuji, Olympus, Topcon, Yashica, Petri, Mamiya, Miranda, Ricoh, Zeiss Ikon, KW, ALPA. Lastly are the companies who didn’t really do a great job with 35mm SLR – Leica, Rollei, Voigtländer. Each manufacturer produced both good and mediocre cameras, and so it really requires some investigation into the right brand.
In all probability, yes. There are undoubtedly some good German SLRs, mostly from East Germany, produced in the 1950s and 1960s. West Germany really didn’t produce that many successful SLRs. Both countries struggled to produce SLRs that could compete with the ones produced by Japanese manufacturers. There are a few good German SLRs, e.g. the Contax S2, but the reality is there is likely better Japanese cameras that are way cheaper.
With the exception of Exakta cameras, many post-war Eastern bloc cameras suffer from lower standards of engineering, reliability, and in some cases poorer usability than West German and Japanese cameras. When they were new, this was less of an issue because these cameras were often sold for dramatically lower prices. However aging cameras can be fraught with issues. Check the reliability of any camera you are interested in.
Cold hard currency. The communist-bloc countries needed currency, and one was to achieve that was to produce goods to sell in the west. Banking on Germany’s pre-war reputation for producing photographic equipment, this was a very lucrative option. Dresden, which ended up in East Germany, was once the European epicentre of photographic innovation. The cameras were often sold cheaply, thanks in part to Eastern-bloc government subsidies.
Anything in the Exakta range, or perhaps a Praktina, or Praktica IV.
Oh, you’re talking about the small independent brands?
This is in part due to a lack of interest in developing their photographic sectors. While the allies poached a lot of high-tech workers from Germany, particularly from the armaments sector, they didn’t relocate any photographic expertise, except from the Russian occupied zone in Germany to the US zone. The boom in SLRs which occurred in the 1950s was driven by cheap cameras and lenses coming out of East Germany, and the growth of the photographic sector in Japan. Countries like the US, UK, and France could not compete, or just didn’t have the ability to get into a market that was dominated pre-war by Germany.
This is a term used by some resellers to indicate that a camera is in near perfect condition, almost like it came out of the factory last week. In many cases it likely means the camera sat in its box, and was never used (if it comes with the box and instructions, even better). However just because it’s mint doesn’t always mean that everything will function the same as it did when it came out of the factory 60 years ago. Materials still may degrade, grease solidifies, and gears seize up.
This is often a choice for people who don’t want to deal with a fully manual camera. This means any 35mm SLR where electronics aid in calculating things like exposure. This could range from something like an aperture-priority-only camera to an autofocus equipped, completely automatic SLR. The only problem with these cameras can be aging electronics. If the electronics stop working, you basically have a paper weight. Choose a camera that is well reviewed and barely ever gets negative reviews. Note that manual cameras often had light meters, but that doesn’t make them electronic cameras (a camera with a light meter can generally be used even if the light meter doesn’t work.)
Choosing a vintage lens is one thing, choosing a vintage camera is a completely different matter. This is partially because people often choose vintage lenses for use with digital cameras, whereas people choose vintage cameras because they are interested in film photography. Choosing a 35mm camera is tricky, because unlike vintage lenses, which are often quite simple in their mechanical ways, 35mm cameras can be quite complex.
Firstly 35mm encompasses two core types of interchangeable lens: rangefinder, and single-lens-reflex (SLR). The rangefinder period started in 1925 with the commercial introduction of the Leica I, and reigned until the early 1960s when 35mm SLR cameras began to dominate. The first production 35mm SLR emerged as the Kine Exakta in 1936 and they progressively gained more of the market. So the first choice really is whether you want to choose a 35mm rangefinder camera, or a 35mm SLR? The choice is based on different perspectives of how a photograph is taken. This choice also dictates the age of a camera, which can be a major issue.
Cameras can be broadly categorized into pre-WW2, and post-WW2. With age comes the same proclivities as suffered by any complex mechanical device. This includes things like penetration of dust and other contaminants which can lead to gears not working properly, or springs loosing their tension. Lubrication grease can dry up, and shutter mechanisms can become brittle. There are a lot of issues which are often very challenging to fix. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that it is impossible to see inside to view the state of the mechanisms. Even the simplest of designs can include an incredible amount of mechanics, mostly to control the shutter, but in some cases the aperture as well.
There is also complexity. Early cameras were obviously manual, and as the decades progressed they incorporated progressively more automatic features, i.e. electronics. In either case, film cameras can be complex with many moving parts. Automatic control and light meters obviously came with another issue – power, or rather batteries.
Apart from the physical issues, choosing a film camera is more about personal choice than anything else. There are a lot of 35mm cameras out there. The best way to choose a camera is to first roughly decide on rangefinder or SLR. The next decision is manual, semi-automatic or automatic. This can be followed by brand, and then narrow it down to a specific model, perhaps based on features. The best way to decide on a specific model, is to make a short-list, and then find some reviews of the cameras. Reviews will usually provide some context on the pros and cons of the camera, including any potential red flags, e.g. commonly recognized faults. If there aren’t any reviews, then that in itself could be a red flag, meaning few people are actually using the camera. Many of these camera reviews are quite extensive, so they should be able to help choose an appropriate film camera.
Beyond the functionality of vintages cameras, to some there is also the aesthetic appeal. Some people like certain 35mm cameras because of how they look. Mostly this is a legacy of likeable cameras.
My best advise for buying a vintage camera is to buy one from a reputable dealer, one who has examined the camera, perhaps fixed any problems, or in any case is willing to specify what issues there are with a camera. A good example is Kamerastore from Finland. They will identify a camera as “Not Passed”, “Passed”, “Certified”, or “Restored”. For example you can buy a restored Olympus OM-1 for around C$370 that has new light seals and has had both the light meter and exposure calibrated. If you find a good camera somewhere for a really good price, and most things seem to work, you can take a gamble, but things like shutter speeds might not be accurate.
Architectural photography usually involves photographing interesting buildings – new, creative buildings, or historic period buildings. Average buildings aren’t usually that interesting, unless you can find an interesting angle. Almost any building can be made interesting just by looking for qualities that make the building stand out.
Consider the photographs below, of one of the buildings in Canada Square in Toronto. The building is simply known as 2180 Yonge Street, and was built in 1972 for the Canadian Tire Corp. This is a building that has only been around for 52 years, but like so many buildings is due to be replaced sometime soon by some neomodernist nightmare. I don’t really know what architectural style the building exhibits, perhaps internationalism? I don’t think most people really think about the building when they walk by it – it is fairly nondescript, from afar it looks like a black block.
But it does have one interesting characteristic – it is festooned with mirrored glass. This can be used to create a series of photographs that reflect the changing neighbourhood. Unlike the many flat modern mirrored buildings, the face of this one has a textured appearance created by different colours of horizontal glass, and vertical banded divisions. This creates an abstract mosaic effect of the the buildings reflected from the opposing side of the road. It almost makes the building seem like a huge screen, bringing it to life. So the interest is not in the building per se, but it’s interaction with its surrounds.
Joseph Schneider (1855-1933) founded Optische Anstalt Jos. Schneider & Co in Bad Kreuznach on January 18, 1913, and in 1922 changed its name to Jos. Schneider & Co., Optische Werke, Kreuznach. The chief designer was Albrecht Wilhelm Tronnier (1902-1982), who joined the company in 1924, and would eventually set up the sister company ISCO (throughout his life he accumulated 124 German patents). They produced a large series of lenses with early trademarks such as “Symmar”, “Componar” and “Isconar”, and “Xenar”. From 1919 they produced a Tessar clone, the “Xenar” in focal lengths from 75 to 480mm. In 1925 the famous “Xenon” was introduced, with focal lengths up to 80mm. The Xenon, is perhaps the company’s most famous lens, and is still being made today.
In 1933 with the passing of Joseph Schneider, his son Josef August Schneider took over the company. In 1936 ISCO was formed as an offshoot of the company. Schneider was one of the lens suppliers to the first Exakta, the 4.5×6cm VP Exakta, providing the Xenar f/3.5, the Xenar f/2.9, and the Xenon f/2. The same lenses would find their way onto the first 35mm SLR, the Kine Exakta in 1936.
During WW2, Schneider had to supply the German Wehrmacht and was forced to manufacture Zeiss products. In the 1950s the company continued development of interchangeable SLR lenses, and supplied lenses to almost all German camera manufacturers. Lenses were made in mounts for Edixa-Mat, Pentax (M42), Praktica, Exakta, and Praktina. Lenses for film cameras were also produced, especially for the 8 and 16 mm narrow film cameras that were popular at the time. Also in the 1950s, the company was one of the first to use computers, the Zuse Z22 to perform lens calculations.
Schneider started developing zoom lenses from 1957, which led to the market launch of the Variogon 1:4/80-240 in 1964. At the end of 1967, Schneider introduced its first TV lens, the TV1 Variogon 2.1/18-200mm. NASA used Schneider lenses on its “Lunar Orbiter” space missions of the Apollo program from 1959 to 1976 and on the space shuttle flights since 1990. The first images of the Earth were taken using Schneider lenses with 45 and 75 mm focal lengths. The lunar orbiter probes also each had a Schneider “Xenotar” on board.
Due to changing economies, Schneider ran into economic difficulties and filed for bankruptcy in 1982. The company was subsequently re-founded by Heinrich Manderman and over the years, acquired the B+W filter factory and Rollei photo technology, among others. After German reunification, Manderman also became involved with Pentacon in Dresden and resumed production of the Exakta 66. The company still exists today, producing cinematic lenses and filters, industrial optical filters, industrial lenses (e.g. C-mount), and photo optics, most notably the B+W Filter brand.
Have you ever noticed how often camera companies release new camera bodies? There is always a lot of fanfare about the fantastic new things these cameras do – but here’s the thing, nothing much has changed with digital cameras in the past decade. In the era of film companies produced new camera bodies as well, but usually only when they heralded the addition of new technology such as the transition to 35mm SLR, or through-the-lens metering. For the most part, analog cameras are just simply a light box which has a lens attached and is loaded with film. The lens deals with the aperture, the camera controls the shutter, and film deals with the fixed ISO.
Camera manufacturers try and make people believe that they need a new camera by flaunting its bells and whistles, to which there are rarely many new ones. More megapixels? Been there, done that. What else is there? Better processing power, more AI? The reality is the things that matter – aperture, shutter-speed, ISO – don’t really change that much. As I have mentioned before there is a point where more megapixels produced diminishing returns.
What really matters in digital photography is lenses. Good quality optics will make the difference between good and mediocre pictures – and lens technology has vastly improved over the past decade. To the point where maybe lenses are a little too complex, but that’s just my personal opinion. There will likely never be a “perfect” lens, but then again neither should there be – from the sheer perspective of character. But even more important than the lens is the ability of the photographer. So if you have a good digital camera, there is no real need to buy a new one. A 24 megapixel camera will be more than adequate for the foreseeable future. Features are nice, but in all likelihood don’t really contribute a great deal to good pictures.
The remainder of the Q&A.
Smartphones have an extremely limited battery life. The newer smartphones like the iPhone have exceptional battery life, for a phone, but not for a camera. Batteries just don’t last that long with smartphones, requiring a battery pack of some sort to keep them going. It is hard to pin down exactly how many photos you can take off a charge, because a smartphone is not a dedicated camera, and therefore uses power for things apart from taking photos. For average use, smartphone batteries are more than adequate, however when used when travelling it could become an issue, largely due to the number of photographs taken. It is easy to have multiple spare batteries for a camera.
Smartphones differ on whether they just offer on-board storage (Apple) or offer access to a removable microSD card slot (Android). Choosing a smartphone with no expandable storage means things will fill up very quickly.
Smartphones tend to lack what I like to call tactile awareness. They aren’t really that ergonomic from the point of holding them, let alone using features. There are some apps that allow better creative control, but all have to be manipulated by means of the touchscreen. And even then they have somewhat poor creative control. Although cameras often suffer from poorly designed menus, the problem with smartphones is that even the best photography software suffers from having a lot of features in a small space. This is sometimes balanced by the amount of post-processing techniques available, but editing a photograph on a small screen is severely limiting. Sure, these smartphones do have fancy AI software to reduce issues, and make “nice” looking photographs, but there is one inherent limitation with this – a loss of character. Smartphone displays, however good aren’t really ideal for photography. Sometimes its hard to see what you are shooting due to glare. Cameras have an EVF which is shielded from the sun.
Aesthetics on a camera is really down to the quality and type of lenses. Most cameras, except for compacts, have interchangeable lenses which makes it easier to achieve a certain aesthetic. For example smartphone cameras can generally not produce bokeh naturally. Smartphone cameras are not exactly designed to have narrow depth-of-field areas, without which it is impossible to naturally create bokeh. Bokeh is typically found in portrait-style photographs where it is added algorithmically by means of computational photography and machine learning (it basically delineates a subject, and then artificially adds blur to the background).
This is a important, because smartphones use Lithium-Ion batteries which are effected by temperature extremes. For example Apple suggests keeping their devices between zero and 35°C. Cold batteries can slow down the function of a smartphone. Cameras on the other hand have a broader working range of temperatures, from 0 to 40°C, and some are designed for temperatures as low as -10°C (e.g. Fujifilm X-T4). Smartphone batteries are also not removable, versus camera batteries which can be removed and kept warm while they are not being used in the cold. Smartphones and freezing temperatures do not mix well. Professional cameras can shoot through everything.
Smartphones can have either digital or optical zoom, or both. Optical zoom provides high-quality, lossless magnification. Digital zoom however enlarges the captured image, and does not involve movement of the camera lens. Digital zoom just zooms in on the pixels, and may result in a loss of image quality. It is achieved by magnifying and interpolating pixels, which can lead to a loss of sharpness and detail. When used on smartphones, digital zoom is often used when the physical limitations of the lens prevent further optical zoom. Some, like the plain iPhone 14, only have digital zoom (5× in this case). The main pros of digital zoom are related to smartphone form-factor: convenience, compact design and cost effectiveness. But the cons somewhat outweigh the pros: loss of image quality, no true magnification, interpolation artifacts, and inferior performance in low light.
Here I’m going to explain a bit more about the caveats of smartphone cameras in the form of a FAQ. I will add that for all their compactness, smartphone cameras produce incredible images, they just have the same limitations all small devices have.
Image quality is partially reliant on the size of photosites, the building blocks of digital images. The larger the photosite, the better it is for low-light conditions. Smartphones have relatively small sensors, and therefore are constrained by the size of their photosites. They still produce images with exceptional quality, but there is a reason people choose full-frame and medium sized sensors for professional work.
Regardless of what companies say, image quality on a smartphone will never be as good as those on a camera. The iPhone 14 Pro has a 1/1.28” sensor on the wide camera with a sensor area of 75mm2, and a pixel pitch of 1.22μm in 48MP mode (2.44μm in 12MP mode). Don’t get me wrong, the technology is amazing – squeezing a camera with a 7-element, 24mm focal length equivalent lens with optical sensor shift. But those pixels are small, and there is only so far you can scale up a 12MP image. In comparison, a 26MP APS-C camera sensor has photosites that have nearly four times the area of the 14 Pro, which means more light can be captured. It also has twice the number of photosites, more photosites amounts to better resolution.
Cameras are all about the glass, or in the case of smartphones – plastic. Most smartphone cameras are comprised of lens elements made out of injection molded optical plastic. Now plastic lenses have been around for a long while, and they have benefits and drawbacks. There are many reasons for this, most notably the fact that plastic elements can be molded into much more extreme aspheric shapes, something not possible in optical glass (aspherical lenses are used in high-end optics to create sharper images and reduce or eliminate some types of optical imperfections). Plastic also allows for thinner lenses that have more complex flange geometries.
The aperture of a lens controls how much light makes its way through to the sensor, controlling things like depth-of-field (or how much of the scene is in focus). Smartphones that work well in low-light situations, without the use of a flash, have large apertures. The wide lens on the iPhone 14 Pro has an aperture of f/1.78, which allows for good low-light performance, but taken into context, an aperture of f/1.78 has the DOF equivalent of an f/6.1 aperture on a full-frame camera. That makes it hard to produce blurry effects naturally – they are usually added artificially in post-processing. These lenses are stuck with a single fixed aperture, providing limited control of exposure. It may seem like you can change the aperture, but apps that allow the aperture to be changed to increase the amount of background blur are really just adding a certain amount of artificial background blur. Camera lenses can change the aperture, and hence the depth of field, facilitating natural blur, i.e. bokeh.
Bokeh has to do with unfocused regions in an image, and relies heavily on a shallow depth-of-field. Many smartphones use wide-angle lenses, and as a result, have quite a large depth-of-field (DOF), the distance between the nearest and farthest elements in a scene that are in acceptably sharp focus. The available depth of field increases as the sensor size and lens focal length decrease, which is why smartphone photographs tend to have very large DOFs. Landscapes, everyday shots, even close-ups have very little out-of-focus. How is bokeh created? Through the power of algorithms. The iPhone uses both cameras to create a DOF-effect in Portrait Mode. It combines the photographs taken by the wide-angle and telephoto lenses, and after applying some computational magic, produces a blurred background. There is even a Depth Control feature which allows the bokeh, to be tailored, between an aperture of f/1.4 and f/16. But it is computationally created, and bokeh is a natural phenomena which occurs in part because of lens optics.
While these lenses are exceptionally designed for the small space they are required to inhabit, they can not really be compared to the larger glass available in dedicated cameras. Photography is about light, and smartphone lenses are extremely small and so don’t really let in the same amount of light. The 24mm equivalent wide angle lens of the iPhone 14 Pro has an actual focal length of 6.9mm (35mm equivalent), the 13mm is actually only 2.2mm, and the 77mm is only 9mm. Basically the focal lengths often used to described in lenses are in terms of their 35mm equivalents, likely to create better associations. For example a 77mm telephoto lens seems easier to understand than a 9mm telephoto.
To get a bit technical, this means the effective diameter of the entrance pupil (DEP) of the wide-angle 6.9mm lens with a max aperture of f/1.78 is 6.9/1.78 = 3.88mm. Comparing this to the equivalent 24mm full-frame lens, say the Sony FE 24mm f/1.4, and the DEP is 17.14mm, much larger. More area equals more light. Apart from the fixed aperture, and compactness of the lenses, there is another big issue. Smartphone lenses, regardless of how many of them are on a phone, can only cover a finite number of focal lengths. Cameras, especially those with interchangeable lenses, can use optical zoom lenses that cover a very broad range of focal lengths. For example the APS-C lens Fujifilm XF 18-135mm (f/3.5-5.6) covers the full-frame equivalent of 36 to 270mm.
Crafting Pixels 