Featuring shots taken from iPhone 6 by people over the world, Apple has dedicated a gallery to showcase these lovely pictures and videos.
While it’s a bold statement to claim iPhone is the only camera you should own, it’s hard to dispute that iPhone takes exceptional pictures. So much so that they’re being used for Apple’s billboard campaign.
As for me, I’m contented with how iPhone has grown with me. In less than 3 years, I’ve accumulated thousands of photos. Many of them are spontaneous shots, taken in fleeting moments that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. Like the shot of a boy with a bowl-like hairstyle in the crowded tram ride up the peak.
Many times I’ve wanted to get a proper camera, but each time i went away, unable to justify its purchase. As the camera in our smartphone gets even better, it’s increasingly less likely I would do so.
Most importantly, what Craig Mod shared about in his piece on Goodbye, Cameras touches on something I deeply agree on.
In the same way that the transition from film to digital is now taken for granted, the shift from cameras to networked devices with lenses should be obvious. While we’ve long obsessed over the size of the film and image sensors, today we mainly view photos on networked screens—often tiny ones, regardless of how the image was captured—and networked photography provides access to forms of data that go beyond pixels. This information, like location, weather, or even radiation levels, can transform an otherwise innocuous photo of an empty field near Fukushima into an entirely different object. If you begin considering emerging self-metrics that measure, for example, your routes through cities, fitness level, social status, and state of mind (think Foursquare, Nike+, Facebook, and Twitter), you realize that there is a compelling universe of information waiting to be pinned to the back of each image. Once you start thinking of a photograph in those holistic terms, the data quality of stand-alone cameras, no matter how vast their bounty of pixels, seems strangely impoverished. They no longer capture the whole picture.