Your phone has no photographs

As we promenaded down Brunswick Street we were greeted by a young man with a camera on a tripod with a lens attached to a leather bellows. I attempted conversation.

“My father did this on Brighton beach in England 70 years ago, selling photos to tourists.”

His gracious affirmation suggested a modest understanding of language. He seemed to be Japanese.

He was a tourist selling photographs to the locals.

We walked away with a Polaroid. My intimate companion was bemused by the realisation that this, the only image in existence, not a hard copy but the original and only, could not be “shared”.

Photograph, coined in 1839 by Herschel is, from the Greek, light (phos) and drawing (graphe).

Seventy years ago a camera, film and a photograph was a technical exercise.

Now any every fool can do is doing this. Yes, space junk litters in orbit threatening to fall to Earth. What about server junk? The “cloud” makes it sound distant and nonintrusive but it’s just a warehoused computer somewhere doing nothing.

The human eye has about 500 megapixels. Your phone has 10 or 20 megapixels. 

Will those images of yesterday’s meal perish before you do?

When you emerge from a cave into daylight, you briefly shield your eyes and wait for them to adjust. A powerful projector in a cinema can burn a hole in a frame if the spinning reel stops and the frame lingers long enough. Your retina, like film, can be damaged. 

You concentrate your vision on whatever takes your interest, your prey. Meanwhile, your peripheral vision has a limited view of a much wider field of other competing predators. You blink to wipe and refresh your eyes. In the case of a camera you wipe with a soft cloth. With a phone, the lens is housed behind a scratch proof transparent plate.

The human eye has about 500 megapixels. Your phone has 10 or 20 megapixels. 

As you adapt to the bright light, your iris closes to limit the intensity of the light entering your eye. On a camera, you close the iris in order to get this desired and chosen effect. The phone has no iris, just a software workaround. It has a fixed aperture of around 2.0.

Counter-intuitively, the value associated with aperture, the f/ stop, is small (2.0) for a wide aperture and big (20) for a narrow aperture.

F/ stop = (focal length)/(diameter of aperture)

Once upon a time film was expensive, limited to a roll of 12, 24 or even 36 shots and you never knew what you had until a week later when the prints arrived.

A side effect of the aperture of the iris is depth of field. When the iris of a camera is wide there is shallower depth of field. This means that something in the middle distance is focussed and those objects closer and further away will be out of focus. When the iris is narrow and constricting there is greater depth of field. This means that things both near and far are in focus.

Bokeh, a Japanese word, signifies a pleasing out of focus effect given to less important objects.

The human eye barely notices soft focus as it darts around the observable world, constantly refocussing. A phone endeavours to keep everything in focus all the time. Interestingly, the newer phones, once again using “clever depth-effect software”, can replicate the effect of bokeh by limiting focus to a designated foreground and ungrudgingly softening the background.

With a camera, by adjusting the iris, you can be quite exacting about how broad or shallow the depth of field, the sharply focussed range, can be.

Having closed the iris to a small aperture there is the issue of insufficiency of light. Returning to the cave, the iris of the human eye simply widens to admit more light. Similarly, the phone does some arithmetic – the less fancy name for an algorithm – and adjusts.

A camera will need adjustment to the duration and sensitivity of exposure.

Remember those 19^th century photos of families, stiff and unsmiling, presenting in their best clothes to capture a moment?

That camera, itself anchored on a tripod, needed a long exposure of a second or more to sufficiently imprint the film. The family was required to stay still.

A modern camera can deploy faster shutter speeds and faster film. Film speed, the rapidity with which an imprint is made, was typically around 200~400 ISO when Kodak, Agfa, Fuji and Ilford were, in their heyday, making the film stock. Digital cameras can nowadays be greater than 10,000 ISO.

I had occasion to visit the the Valley of the Kings alongside the Nile some years ago. The use of flash photography in underground tombs was forbidden. Even better than fast film, a digital camera’s sensitivity to light can be cranked up so as to function in what the human eye perceives as complete darkness.

Bokeh, a Japanese word, signifies a pleasing out of focus effect given to less important objects.

If you’re in the area and have a phone, maybe buy a postcard and take a shot of that. The guy who shot the postcard probably had a digital camera.

Simply put, a $200 camera in a $2000 handheld computer/phone may well serve your needs. You don’t need to trouble your pretty little head. A $2000 camera will enable you to make educated choices rather than just palming the problem off to some software engineer.

The human eye and the phone cannot zoom. When you zoom the image from a phone, you simply “zoom in” and stretch the image; the pointillist pixels get bigger. Or you can get a clunky zoom lens attachment to dangle off and belabour your phone. 

A camera lens can truly zoom.

Finally, film is not for the faint hearted.

Once upon a time film was expensive, limited to a roll of 12, 24 or even 36 shots and you never knew what you had until a week later when the prints arrived. You had an economic imperative and a limited opportunity to get it right.

A photographer anticipated the “decisive moment” before pressing the button.

Henri Cartier-Bresson framed the shot perfectly in recognition of the existing world and then waited for something to happen in the frame.