Most people's spontaneous photographs these days are taken with a smartphone, and that's been the case for many years now. Because the smartphone is so ubiquitous, most of us may not be aware of how it has changed, and continues to change, the way we capture memories.
Apple's iPhone 11[1], which went on sale last month, is an amazing technical achievement, and I was interested to examine just how it is changing the way that we see.
I performed an experiment: I took a series of shots with an iPhone 11 and a digital still camera at the same time. The set-up for the test was a photo shoot with my friend Natalia. The camera loves Natalia — every camera loves this lady — so she was a perfect choice as the model for the experiment.
I took all the iPhone pictures with Apple's top-of-the-line device, the iPhone 11 Pro Max, the model that starts at $1,099. It has three different cameras so it gives you three different options for depth of field. It also has all kinds of new software capabilities to dress up your photos.
For comparison, I used a five-year-old digital camera called the "Quattro DP3," from Japan's Sigma Corp. It has a couple of good attributes for this kind of experiment. It has an excellent sensor, made by Silicon Valley chip company Foveon (owned by Sigma) that can capture lots of nuances of light and texture, and a lens that never lies about the lines or curves in a scene. And it's a very straightforward camera: It gives you hardly any fancy options to dress-up photos. In a sense, it's very truthful.
Look at this