Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max (5.1mm, f/1.6, 1/610 sec, ISO32)

Yesterday I took a long walk on a frosty day. I took no camera because I didn’t plan to take any pictures. But I didn’t even make it past my car without taking one.

If you are a photographer, you are a photographer and because of that you are constantly looks for images even if you have no camera with you. And the ice on my windshield of my car was a perfect image.

So luckily I had a camera with me. the one in my iPhone 12 Pro max. A long name for a cool and very big phone. I was an early adopter and completely switched to digital photography in January 2002. Almost 20 years ago. And I got my first mirrorless in 2010. A Sony NEX 5. The NEX 5 and many mirrorless cameras that came after it were hopeless compared to DSLRs. Slow autofocus, slow frame rates, slow operation but I knew back then that in a couple of years DSLRs would be as dead as a dodo. And now they are for anything but sport photography or action photography and even in it that field things are going to change: Nikon Z9.

Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max (5.1mm, f/1.6, 1/1100 sec, ISO32)

But I honestly had no idea that mobile phones will become such excellent cameras. I can’t even remember my first mobile phone that had a camera but I think it was the iPhone 4. My company phones at that time were Blackberry’s and I think they didn’t have a camera. But the camera in the iPhone 4 was very poor and I didn’t take many pictures. My next phone was the iPhone 6 plus and things got a little better. I used to take more pictures with it and in good light it was rather good.

My next step was the iPhone Xs and its camera was a game changer. Excellent HDR and impressive video I couldn’t imagine that it could go any better. Well my iPhone 12 Pro max was another dramatic step. Especially in low light/high contrast scenes it is truly impressive and I would need to work hard on the RAW files of my cameras or even take multiple exposures to create something similar. The results are really impressive.

Will phones replace my cameras in the future? I don’t think so simply because I love to shoot with a real camera. I just love to use different lenses, to play around with knobs and to use a nice viewfinder. No phone can give me that. But of course I will take more and more images with my phone. Because the image I get is already better than what I got from my small sensor digital cameras. But most of all because my phone is always with me. In that sense it is already the best camera today.

Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max (5.1mm, f/1.6, 1/900 sec, ISO32)