Introduction
The biggest brands in cameras are losing customers to
smartphones. Since the iPhone was launched in 2007,
it has become one of the world’s most popular ways to
take pictures. Anyone with an iPhone has access to
a camera at all times. Best of all, you don’t need to
worry about complicated camera settings. Because
the software does the heavy lifting, all you need to do
is capture the right moment by pressing the virtual
shutter button.
For the finishing touch, the iPhone user can
choose from dozens of apps with preset filters and
effects to enhance the mood and color of their photo-
graphs, and then share their images with family and
friends, or the entire world, through social media just
as easily.
The iPhone and other smartphones like it have
democratized photography, transforming it from an
expensive hobby into something virtually anyone
can enjoy.
We also take pictures wherever and whenever we
want, and smartphones have given rise to a new genre
of photography: the now ubiquitous selfie.
To understand how revolutionary the iPhone has
been for the field of photography and how disruptive
it has been to the camera industry, consider a few
statistics.
Camera sales, especially of point-and-shoot
models, have been in dramatic decline since 2011. At
the same time, the number of pictures taken in 2018
alone was more than 1.7 trillion (
).
In 2015, the iPhone surpassed digital single-lens
reflex (DSLR) cameras produced by legacy brands like
Nikon and Canon as the camera used most among the
120 million photographers who share photos on Flickr. It
gained even more ground over the following two years.
Instagram, the single most popular app for editing
photos and instantly sharing them, surpassed 800 mil-
lion users by the start of 2018.
The Pew Research Center surveyed smartphone
users and found that 92 percent said the camera was
the most used feature on their phones — it sees more
action than email, internet browsing, or — what we
used to use phones for — voice calls. The survey also
showed that 80 percent of those surveyed share the
photos they take with others.
“The most pervasively used technology is first
the mobile phone,” said Jason Farman, an associate
professor at University of Maryland, College Park,
who teaches courses on mobile media and digital
culture. “They are more numerous than toilets and
toothbrushes… There are more cameras now than ever
have been in the history of the world.”
The cameras in the first few iPhone models did
not get much notice in photography circles. The picture
quality at 2 megapixels with a fixed-focus lens was
barely serviceable. Yet users seemed to overlook the
camera’s limitations because of how fun it was to shoot
and share instantly.
Apple continued to enhance its camera’s features
and develop software that solved challenges with
lighting and color reproduction. The breakthrough
came with the iPhone 4s, which even impressed some
longtime photographers. A decent print could be made
using an image taken with a 4s camera, and profes-
sionals began to spread the news.
iPhone photos began to appear on gallery walls as
fine art, on the front page of the
New York Times
as part
of a war photographer’s combat reportage, on magazine
covers from
Time
to
Elle
, and on the pages of
Sports
Illustrated
, which devoted several pages to quirky, off-
beat scenes from staff photographer Brad Mangin.
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