Phoning It In

For quite a few years, now, I've been using an iPhone 4s which I inherited from my daughter when she moved up to a new phone plan and had no further need for it. I was pleased to have it, as a 4s had been my first revelation of the smartphone experience: back in 2011 the university loaned me one so that I could be involved in the development of this new-fangled thing called an "app" for our students, who seemed oddly reluctant to interact with us using anything other than their phones. Their phones? This, despite the generous quantities of PC workstation clusters we had only just thoughtfully scattered around the campus (see the post Phone Fun). Kids!

That iPhone has served me well and I have been reluctant to replace it, as it's a solid, reliable device, which I use almost exclusively as a phone, with a bit of texting and WhatsApp thrown in. True, it has also been a handy clock, calculator, and travel radio. Oh, and weather forecaster, train timetable, and world map. However, despite the occasional experiment, I have somehow never come to see it as a camera. The fact is that, despite the praise heaped on it at the time of its release, the output leaves an awful lot to be desired. In the proverbial event that Elvis were to step out of a flying saucer in our street, it would never have occurred to me to reach for my phone, in the absence of a "proper" camera. More to the point, the iPhone 4s is also now permanently marooned at a truly ancient release of the operating system – iOS 9.3.6 – and therefore cannot load the current incarnations of many apps, including (incredibly but thankfully) the NHS Covid-19 "track and trace" app. Pingdemic, what pingdemic?

While we were away in Dorset recently, however, I was impressed by the photographic results my daughter was getting on her iPhone 11, and I had to concede that cameras on phones are now more than good enough for many purposes; either that, or she is a better photographer than me, which is clearly unthinkable. So, given the cash surplus I have accumulated over the period of the pandemic – not catching trains up to London once a month or so, at £30+ a trip, must have saved me around £600 all by itself – I thought the time had finally come for a hardware upgrade. I swallowed hard (I hate spending money), and bought myself an iPhone 12 "mini", which is just a bit larger than the 4s, but has a lot more screen.

The various iPhone 12 models have been much trumpeted for their photographic abilities, but this is something I have taken with a large pinch of salt, coming as it does from people whose main picture-making activity seems to be photographing their own dinner plate, and whose main technical ambition is apparently to achieve a blurred background ("just like a pro!"). It seemed obvious I'd need something more sophisticated than the built-in camera app so, after some consumer research, I settled on the Halide app, with its capacity to create "raw" files from the iPhone data. The initial results have been promising, but I still need to do a lot of work on the reflex to use my phone as a camera.

Actually, the initial results are not so much promising as convincing. To be honest, I hadn't really expected to use my new phone's "camera" as anything much more than a note-taking device, for use as a stand-in when I didn't have an actual camera to hand: useful for recording things like textures for later use in digital collages, family snaps, or those unexpected little still-life compositions that crop up everywhere once you're attuned to them. It was obvious – to someone of my high standards – that a tiny 12 megapixel sensor with a fixed aperture of  f/1.6 and a rather wide angle of view wouldn't be adequate for anything more. I also expected to ignore the JPEG or HEIC output, and work exclusively with the "raw" files produced by Halide. After a few weeks of experiment and comparison, however, it seems I may have been wrong on most counts, although there are pluses and minuses in every direction you choose to look. So much depends on factors like light levels, acceptable amounts of "noise", whether a file is uploaded from the phone direct to a PC via a cable, or indirectly via iCloud, email, or social media, and so on. The main limiting factor for me, however, will always be the fixed wide angle lens, even though this is something I'd become accustomed to by using the Fuji X-70; I much prefer working with a "standard zoom" in the wide to mid-telephoto range.

So, there's going to be some "iphoneography" around here. My hope is that you won't even notice, unless I draw your attention to it, perhaps by making some comparisons. I'm not sure who I'd be trying to convince, though, other than myself. You have probably already come to your own conclusions about "phone versus camera". If worldwide sales of compact cameras are any indication, most people have already come down firmly on the "phone" side of the debate, which is not surprising, given the uses to which most people put their photographs. But it seems that even some entirely serious photographers have fallen in love with their phones. Who knows? I might yet turn out to be one of them.

Incidentally, something I have only just discovered but which is probably common knowledge in the smartphone community (i.e. pretty much everyone else on the planet) is that an iPhone with no SIM is still a working WiFi device, provided it has previously been "activated" (I imagine the same is true of an Android phone), so the 4s will continue to have its uses. For example, and ironically, perhaps, I now find I'm interested in its capacities as a lo-fi alternative camera... [phone displays "eyeroll" emoji].

All three of the pictures in this post were taken with the new phone, but this last is the one that really gave me pause for thought. Remarkable quality, I think, even compared with a good 12 MP compact camera (Fuji X20).