Having sat through the latest cult fest from Apple about how they have made the best camera in the world (I paraphrase/exaggerate  but not by much) I took my iPhone for a bit of a workout at Liverpool yesterday and I learnt a very good lesson.  The iPhone camera is great but you really have to remember that it is little more than an instamatic camera.  You can capture really great images but at the same time it is hugely limited.   What it can do, and yesterday I was guilty of this, is to make you lazy and assume that the camera is so much better than it really is.  You then get back home and start to work on the image and realise that many a great image was spoilt by the photographer forgetting to be a photographer and thinking that the camera will pick up the pieces.  The iPhone does pick up a lot of the pieces dropped by the photographer but there are limits – something that Apple neglect to mention.

I suspect many people who might read this will think it is so last century to post produce the image outside of the iPhone, after all there are so many apps out there that will help you make some great images.  This is true up to a point and that point where the camera doesn’t live up to the hype or where you want to view the image on something more than an iPhone or in Facebook.

Don’t get me wrong the iPhone SE is a great camera and I love it to bits.  I have made some great images over year using a variety of iPhones and the images above are not bad in anyway it is just when you start to work on the resultant images you realise that they can’t take the heavy lifting that a RAW fill can.   The images, after all, are JPEGS which is one of the worst file formats for storing image data (god bless Shannon’s entropy) .  As a photographer you must bare this in mind when using the iPhone, yesterday I didn’t and it came back to bit me on the bum just a little.