Framed Prints of London, New York and Paris.

You would think the most common question people ask me about gear would be ‘What pro camera do you use’ or ‘Do you use Canon or Nikon’ but it’s not. The most common question I get asked is ‘Can I make a print like yours from an iPhone’. All of us have a phone these days except my photographer friend Will who has a brick Nokia. Apart from Will most of us have a camera in our pocket in the form of a smartphone. Whatever brand the smartphone it is they take great photos and sharing our photos is super easy. I have an iPhone. The camera roll on my phone is full of images of my kids and pictures they’ve sent to me which I’ve saved.

The print above needs a huge resolution to make a large panoramic.

An iPhone has a camera which is always ready at the right place and right time. So much of photography is about being in the right place at the right time. An iPhone and all of that computing cleverness will handle the lighting, the skin tones and the depth of field. The picture you take of the kids in the park will take perfect pictures and you don’t need to know anything about photography.

So much about the fine art photography that I do is about taking all control away from the camera. I like to decide myself how the blacks will appear, the exposure of the sky or how blurry the movement will be. I work with my camera on manual, I can’t do that on an iPhone.

But the biggest difference between an iPhone camera and a pro camera is the resolution required to make a print. Film or digital, a pro lens/camera combination will produce pin sharp smooth images at huge resolutions that enables me to make a large print. An iPhone can produce a lovely image on a screen but the pixels start turning into big squares if you enlarge a camera phone image.

So my photographer friend Will doesn’t have children and doesn’t have or want an iPhone. He has a beautiful Canon A1 film SLR and a medium format film camera. He takes gorgeous landscapes and a works for magazines who need high quality to print his work. He’s a bit ‘old school’ like me but in the park if I got my pro camera out of my bag, attached a flash and a zoom lens to it the moment with the kids would have gone. I’d also look conspicuous. I use my phone instead for the fun in the park shots.

The print below was taken on a Medium format pro film camera. An iphone couldn’t take this sort of image.

So to summarise both my phone and my big cameras have a place in my life. Neither can replace the other although I do know of a wedding photographer whose assistant shot all her images on an iPhone16. The bride was delighted with the pictures and without knowing chose mostly all of the iPhone pictures for their online album!