When it comes to the current state of iPhoneography, the Moment lens system is a game changer. Now the photographer can choose their field of view with a smartphone and get a good quality image. Moment also has a camera app that really works well with their lenses.
The Moment phone case with a built in battery is also sweet! Now you don’t have to worry about your limited phone battery life when using such an intense application as shooting in 4k or shooting at high frame rates at 2k. The Moment case attachment system isn’t just solid. It’s also functional and very attractive. These guys are doing it right!
Lightroom CC combined with camera raw on the smartphone is also a game changer. Now a photographer can do really useful post-production tweaks to photos shot on the smartphone. I love the Lightroom camera app within Lightroom CC. I love being able to edit photos on the smartphone or the tablet “on the fly.”
And with the installed SmugMug smartphone app, Lightroom CC provides users with an easy way to share directly to your SmugMug albums. I can now recreate my iPhoneography album and direct upload! That’s just pure awesomeness! (Oh, and yes, you can upload to Instagram and other social media sites.)
The Movi FreeFly Smartphone Robot is a game changer as well. The camera stabilization system keeps hand-held video silky smooth and also provides some great creative shot types. Movi’s app for the FreeFly Smartphone Robot offers a variety of shooting modes that take time lapse, hyperlapse, and handheld video to a whole new level. This little robot is cinematic and just plane fun!
And of course I have to mention the love of my video shooting camera app life: FiLMiC Pro. I won’t go into details here about that awesome app. If you shoot video, it’s a must.
Last, but not least, is the Mavic Pro drone. While it doesn’t use the camera on the smartphone, it does use the smartphone to control the drone’s flight. So, I feel compelled to add it to the list in the state of phone-ography.
These tools, and more, frankly, all combine to create a compelling platform for some amazing capture experiences. No, the image quality is not the same as my Canon 5D Mark IV1 , but these tools help significantly close the capture quality gap, especially when you factor in portability and accessibility.
The convenience (It’s in my pocket for goodness sake.), size and weight factors alone make me reach for the phone over and over again more and more. And the image quality looks really good—or, as Steve says, “It’s good enough!” Yes, I wish the image quality were better, much better, but… it’s definitely good enough.2
I’m currently agonizing over whether or not to even take my Canon and all of that heavy glass on our next vacation. Lugging that stuff around the airports, lifting that ungodly weight into the plane’s overhead bins (hoping the overhead bins are full-sized on each flight and that no one checks and notices the suitcase weighs a ton!), and then chugging it from hotel room to hotel room is just a royal pain. Compare that to the size and weight of the phone and a handful of accessories.
Yep. More and more, it’s the smartphone!
I totally love my Canon camera and lenses!! But damn that glass is heavy! I have to really feel a need for the quality to lug it around and use it. ↩
Remember when the first phone smartphone camera apps, like Instagram, for example, shot such horrid images they used “filter packs” to pretend they were creatively looking back to the old Polaroid technology instead of just hiding the ghastly image quality?! ↩