I’ll be a bit tongue in cheek as I like pictures and acknowledge that a flapping-mirrors (my name for DSLR) can take great pictures.
But yeah, nothing like a good 2010-era debate about the merits of DSLRs. Never mind that the ship has sailed, camera sales including DSLR and mirror-less sales continue to fall. If they were remarkably better wouldn’t sales rise? I mean, they’re at ISO 100,000 now, and 40 megapixels… and raw. Raw is better right?
Are people losing interest in photography? I’d say not, judging by my social media it’s at an all time high.
I’ll just open with the first terrible photo that comes up on flickr iPhone 7 search:
How about iPhone 7 and night?
I like this quote because most people are most people, including people that have an interest in actual photography. [quote=“Woolen_Horde, post:5, topic:130256”]
if you have a DLSR you’re looking to take advantage of the much-larger sensor size
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I agree. They key advantage these days is depth of field provided by prime lenses combined with the large sensor area. While camera phones are making progress the direct results of a DSLR are undoubtedly better.
Interesting that you worded it like this instead of “your mid-day photos on an overcast day look flat”. I don’t intend to pick on Enidigm, I’ll come back to this in a second, but it’s so easy to assign the fault to the equipment or process (which I love to do too, because my pictures are not that good either!).
And raw. Raw gives you a bit more editing room. Instead of upping the contrast a lot, you can REALLY REALLY up the contrast. 99% of the time the extra room doesn’t help your pictures and often makes them worse. Sometimes it does help. But overall you can adjust the white balance, sharpness, saturation, curves, crop, and any other edits you do in a jpg almost as well.
Here is what you can do with raw (based on a 2017 article):
Here is what you can do with jpg:
I like how he picked a slightly more interesting photo for the raw example just to help confirm-bias the semi-interested reader. Is the raw conversion much better? Not to my eyes, it is over-processed, and I’d rather have my time back and not fiddle storage while on vacation.
Here’s the main point on your photos @Enidigm. You weren’t out there 30 minutes before sunrise with a heavy tripod and an ultra-wide angle lens. But that’s fine, those are nice photos. You can probably edit them and crop them into a great photo book for the family. Getting to that spot 30 minutes before sunrise probably didn’t or wouldn’t fit with your vacation plans or goals. It seems to me like the iPhone fit better with your vacation plans and goals.
But keep the DSLR as a hobby! Family photos, outings around town, weddings, kids, all fun and better with a DSLR and a couple reasonably-priced prime lenses. I’m conscious of the negative tone in this post, but they really are better. Just not worth the cost and effort for a lot of situations.