Almost no-one who matters cares about "image quality". It's something that just needs to be good enough. It's not a particularly important aspect of making a good photo. OP's story highlights a much more important aspect: being in the right place at the right time.
I guess I'm getting old, but I can't help but observe that the image quality provided by a smartphone today is superior to anything available even to rich amateurs when I was a kid in the 90s. This is especially so when you look at color accuracy and dynamic range as well as resolution (which is much less important, but much more often obsessed over).
Good thing I don't care at all what most people care about. If everyone had your attitude we'd all be listening to pop music instead of classical as well.
In most situations that photographers actually care about (i.e. capturing beautiful, good light), ILCs already murder the iPhone. Computational photography may be cool but it is just helping the iPhone emulate ILCs.
The iPhone 12 may have some cool auto computational features, but in no way is it better than an ILC camera like a DSLR. If you actually compare image quality side by side, a DSLR typically will smoke an iPhone. Not to mention there is no way to go past ~100mm on even the best phones.
Oh I forgot, I only do portraits and stopped taking interchangeable lens cameras with me places over half a decade ago. I don't do landscapes or wildlife photography, nor did I ever have a desire to to make rivers look like smudges with a long exposure.
For portraits, iPhone 12 Pro in okay lighting is the first one where I say, yeah good enough and often times better.
I don't care about DXOMark, I care about what humans think, and across mediums a photo from an iPhone 12 Pro absolutely is good and great enough.
I keep trying to leave my DSLR at home, but instead am looking at upgrading my Nikon. I love the iPhone and what it can do, and think flagship phones are the best snapshot cameras there have ever been.
But, my Nikon with my 50mm just takes noticeably better pictures in so many situations, particularly portraits. And if I expand my lens usage to my wide angle or my 300mm now we’re into types of pictures phones are completely incapable of taking.
Even if I wasn’t, I love large prints and we always have some up in our house. Cell phone pictures are fine if you’re looking at them on your phone - not so much at 20x30”.
knowing that you only do portraits makes me disagree with you even more, no way your iphone can come close to a portrait shot with an 85mm or 135mm lens. Also the bokeh effect on iphones looks super unnatural
Well, if you take one single kind of image that the software is optimized to almost fake, yes you can get close. But you'll never get to the level of, say, an a7iii+85mm1.4 even for portraits, even in good light.
In any case, good enough and better are two very different words. I really enjoy taking pictures on an ILC much more and the results I get are noticeably better even in portraits, including by people that don't know what I took it with. For example, good luck emulating the look of a 135mm f/2.8 (at night) with an iPhone if we're talking about portraits, or good luck doing better than a 50mm 1.4 for street, good luck doing better than a 70-200 2.8, and so on.
But yes, it has a much lower skill ceiling and often more consistent results, and it really does get close.
I enjoy the a-series but that’s exactly what I’m moving on from
I think I’ll get a gimbal and some contraption to trigger flash and maybe some adapter lenses as they trickle out for this form factor
Yes, the consistency in such a wide range of lighting situations is what’s attractive. Along with the built in non-destructive editing. Soon, ProRAW for even more of that. Live Photos by default which “captures the moment” more than the composition itself, and a software and syncing pipeline that supports that seamlessly. With the nearest replacement being an entire tool-belt and bags of gear.
I think at this point we will see the market choose, and often times I ahead of the accepted trend on that. A daguerreotype was probably superior processing technology than film and paper but it wasn’t convenient enough to remain an option. Same went for film and dedicated digital cameras. I think this is where we are now with the iphone 12 pro and ProRAW, even for photo enthusiasts.
Well, to boot, no, film and paper were far way easier and more powerful to process than daguerréotype, and digital is also way more powerful to process than film. That being said, I do think you lose out on a lot of convenience with an iPhone as your sole camera.
To start, you can actually crop. You can use lenses with a higher focal length than 70mm, which for many people makes all the difference in portraits. If you're using something like ProRAW, you're limited to 1/3 of an FPS vs 20FPS.
If you want to capture the moment on an ILC, you can also just hold the shutter. This would be the very first time we go from a platform that has higher image quality and more editing lattitude to a technology that has less of it. The replacement isn't an entire tool belt and bags of gear, for me it's an A7ii and a 28-75 2.8 (for a total cost lower than the iPhone 12 Pro + my current phone and will outlive it by four or five times).
As for sales, the iPhone has already gobbled up everything except the high end camera market, which is actually seeing increasing sales, so we'll see about that. I don't find it all that probable.
As for ProRAW, it's technically completely inferior to, say, an ARW file.
There's not much difference between the different formats in terms of engineering genius. The Raw data from a camera is basically a matrix of numbers...not too much innovation possible there. The fact that there are different formats is somewhat of a historical accident, and they preceded the DNG format. The format absolutely CAN be stored in a DNG, and in fact Pentax cameras have the option of either DNG or PEF.
Me too. For people on shared hosts (hundreds of small websites including small businesses), PHP is pretty much the only server-side language that you have access to (well, maybe aside from Perl).
It is a diagram whose vertices are mathematical objects and whose arrows are morphisms (often functions) between those objects such that any two paths between two vertices represent the same morphism/function. Typically it is used to infer information about one morphism or object using others, by keeping track of many properties at once in a graphical fashion.
I was thinking the title meant that I could sync an iPad with Linux...too bad. I was hoping that someone made it possible to sync music with the latest iOS.
The reason basically comes down to the fact that every time you perform a compass and straight-edge construction, you are constructing quadratic extensions of number fields, whereas trisection (in general) needs a cubic extension.
The 'in general' part is important: of course, you can trisect specific angles like a 90 degree angle.
(The construction of number field extensions is happening because let's say you construct a 90 degree angle, well that allows you to construct an isosceles triangle with equal sides length 1, and therefore you construct the square root of 2, so the extension Q(sqrt(2))
Absolutely true, there is a lot to prove there. It's not an elementary explanation by any means, rather it is an outline that someone who knows Galois theory well could probably reconstruct.
It does make you much better at formulating problems. In fact, from my experience as a mathematician and watching others do math, the vast majority of good problems comes after someone has solved a problem and then asked, "what if we change this instead?"
No, polygons in non-Euclidean space makes sense. Polygons and more generally, geometric simplicial complexes in other spaces is a branch of mathematics all by itself (geometric group theory), so you certainly shouldn't "throw it out the window".
