Throw Away Your Mobile Phone

Almost everyone has a phone camera these days and with every new model the quality of the images they produce gets better and better. As we have them with us all the time, they are better than compact cameras which they have quite rightly replaced but it will be a long time, if ever, that the physical limitation of a phone camera can be overcome to the extent that they will truly replace an Interchangeable Lens Camera (i.e a DSLR or Mirrorless camera).

In poor light they struggle to reproduce colours accurately without introducing a lot of noise or using a harsh flash and being so slim they do not zoom well. The ability to zoom, that is to change your focal length, is often important in many aspects of photography but we’ll touch on that in more depth later. Phone cameras are very good at taking some landscapes photos and pictures of friends, family and pets at parties and other occasions etc… I’m talking about the sort of day to days snaps that we all take from time to time. Phone camera absolutely have their place, and using their limitations to your advantage will allow you to take exceptional pictures but you will struggle to take, for example, good nature photographs with a phone camera. To illustrate my point I’m going to use a prop - a lovely, cheap, plastic butterfly:

Our inexpensive nature prop

Now, I’m using a prop butterfly for reasons that will become apparent. Let’s put our prop butterfly in a realistic situation. On a rose bush. Now imagine I’m in my garden and see this lovely butterfly settling onto a bush a few feet away – I reach for my phone, turn on the camera app, hold out my arm and take my snap:

Spot the butterfly

Now, I’ve taken that picture with my phone camera about 5 feet from the rose bush. Let’s be honest, we can hardly see our beautiful butterfly it seems so far away! So, I have a choice, I can either zoom, or I can try to get the phone camera physically closer. First let’s use the zoom feature on the phone. On my phone I just use two fingers on the screen and push them apart which digitally zooms the image. I will explain what “digital zoom” is later. Here I have zoomed as close as the camera will allow:

Pixelated mess

Oh dear. That’s not very good is it? I mean, I can see it’s a butterfly but all the lovely detail is lost - the picture is very blurry and this is typically the result of digital zoom. What happens if I actually move my phone closer to the butterfly? Say, 3 feet away?

There is a butterfly here, right?

What about 2 feet away?

Oh there it is.

1 foot away?

Getting better

6 inches away?

Bingo!

And there we are. Finally I have a reasonable picture of our lovely plastic butterfly but to get it I had to be within 6 inches of it. In real life it's very likely your lovely butterfly is going to have flown off long before you get within 6 inches.

Of course it’s perfectly possible to get great pictures from my phone camera. If I was to try this at dawn when real insects are warming up and still quite lethargic I might be able to get really close without it flying off and if I was just talking a picture of the flower it would do it but without any of that lovely bokeh (blurry background) that is natural with Interchangeable Lens Cameras. And I wish you best of luck getting 6 inches close to a wild bird, or a roe deer in a forest. If you want better results you might want to consider something else and it’s for that reason that the best results are often obtained with a dedicated camera.

So with the above in mind, if you've decided that photography is for you, and you're thinking about upgrading from your mobile phone but you haven't got the first clue about how DSLRs or Mirrorless cameras work then you may find the articles on this site very helpful. I have written them primarily for myself, as my own learning guide (and even after several years of using a DSLR I'm very much still learning), but if you can learn something too, then even better.

Check out my other articles