Also, most photos that I see people take with their phones have the saturation way too intense than in real life. I believe they are taking HDR photos but the auto-balancing act of the HDR tones is just not quite right. Same goes for the blurring effect. The depth of field achieved by phones are so artificial and unnatural that it throws me off a lot. It just flattens everything behind the subject and gives the same amount of blur. But depth of field doesn't work like that in real life!
Phones' default behavior should be to capture the photo as true to real life as possible and then maybe if the user wants to be creative, then reveal all the tools.
In general companies want to create phones which take photos the customer likes, with as little effort as possible. As it turns out people do not want to see accurate photos with natural colors. They certainly do not want to see ugly people or boring scenes, irregardless of the photo being taken.
Like many things phone cameras are a thing which is for people uninterested in the thing itself.
But technical perfection is not the only determining factor in great photographs. The computational photography people are essentially the gearheads of years past. Yes, there are places where pin-sharp focus and a near-complete lack of distortion, coma, and chromatic aberrations are necessary. But a tack-sharp photograph that is "correctly" exposed is not automatically a great photograph.
Among the most famous and recognizable photographs in the portfolio of Ansel Adams is "Moonrise Over Hernandez, NM". And yet, the negative is at least a stop underexposed and a bitch to print. At least, so I'm told by an acquaintance who worked as one of his assistants for a while. Adams at one point used a chemical intensifier on the foreground of the negative to up the contrast[1].
> Phones' default behavior should be to capture the photo as true to real life as possible
Unfortunately, there is no process capable of capturing the world the way the eyes see it. In his 1985 paper, "A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image"[2] Brian Winston made clear that every photograph is a compromise from "reality", and the nature of those compromises is determined by ideology and culture.
1 http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/grant/ansel-adams-...
My photography back before I deleted Instagram was focused mostly on landscapes and architecture -- when I got my start folks would talk about "the camera you have", and this was just as 4+ megapixel point and shoots were getting into the sub 300 range -- folks complain about "smartphones" but the future that mirrorless lenses has brought us is one that was only delayed by folks like me who refuse to carry a bulky DSLR all day let alone multiple lenses in a cute little bag. [snorts audibly]
I don't think things people have thought through very basic things about computational photography.
For example, Pennsylvania fought hard to not be part of Real ID[0]... but people move around.
I know they scanned my face when I moved to the District of Columbia.
In fact, I specifically commented at one point to a friend it was as if there was a set of folks who wanted for privacy for the wrong reasons, and that they were making a game of connecting me with job interviews folks could treat like free consulting sessions so they could continue engaging in... really rude behavior.
Then again, sometimes people say one thing and mean another -- I know that now, just like I did when I got my first DSLR from Newegg the last time I lived in the city I'm currently living in.
That's a thing you can do -- say one thing and mean another, but that's more for like... a, but the problem becomes you might have some chicken fingers loving autist pump the brakes and quiet part out loud.
The quiet part being "we're not in high school, or at least I'm not, so if you act as exhausting as folks acted in the 2000s, I can just start strangling you then tell the judge it was self defense, just like as I disussed at multiple conferences, I can do the same "claim self defense to the judge" for defense for cyber -- so keep fucking around, and you might keep finding out in ways other than a legally permitted passive aggressive rant on the orange site.
Then again, I hate people, that's why lately I mostly take photos of slugs.
(I've seen a LOT more, larger, in a short timespan, than ever in my life.. they used to be either a different species, much smaller, or they're living longer, because the ones when I was a kid were less than an inch long and really only came out after an intense rain... I saw one the size of my pinkie the other day for the third time in a month, and it's getting cold.)
Also, sorry that this got posted while I was drafting -- unlike the King of North Korea or whatever, I'm not literally a god -- sometimes I make mistakes.
- "Greg"