It seems that everybody now has a camera in their mobile phone. Quite a useful little gimmick accessory. If you're carrying your phone around, it's no more effort to carry a camera. If you have the phone handy for calls, by definition it's also handy to grab a snapshot. Very useful for instant documentary.
But are they any good?
We have been watching Tom Ang's Digital Picture of Britain. Fascinating. For each programme he gets three professional photographers and randomly distributes to them a digital camera, either a top-of-the-range professional SLR, a mass market compact or a phone, albeit a rather high-end phone. They make of it what they will. Being professionals, they take some reasonably good photos with the phones, but nobody's fooled as to the quality.
However, that doesn't stop the masses. We have people taking photos with their phones and publishing them to the web, sort of. Mainly using Flickr.
I have always loved photography. Even at the age of seven I was bossing my father around over what pictures to take. I didn't like his camera, far too fiddly, and, more importantly, way too heavy and cumbersome for my hands which were even ickler then than now.
Bizarrely, I didn't get my own camera until I was 16. A Boots Instamatic, using 126 film and flashbulbs. Some of my friends mocked - they had 110 (or, later, disc-cameras) with built in flash. But, actually, until the 135 compacts became affordable, the 126s gave the best quality photos. And the use of external flash, however primitive, avoided red eye. The trouble was, flashbulbs were so expensive. Film was expensive. Processing was expensive. One film of 24 exposures had to do for a whole holiday.
There was no opportunity to experiment, to take risks. Every failure cost money. My money. My pocket money.
Every photo had to be special. And had to be retained.
As it seems that everybody is publishing extremely poor quality photos taken with their phones, I thought I would pause and reflect on whether we have come far in 21 years.
I took a photo album off the bookshelf and scanned a few photos.
I feel rather proud of them. They are so spectacularly crap that I feel tempted to set up a Flickr account and claim I took them with my phone. Only I can't be bothered to set up ways to transfer photos from my phone to my PC. Much easier to scan in old photos.
I'm not saying that this will be a regular occurrence, but from time to time, some old photos will appear. Hopefully, as we hit the 90s the quality of photography will improve. Hopefully, by the time we hit the 20teens, the quality of mophlogging will improve.
