How many cameras have you owned in your lifetime? Big, small. Snapshots like a Polaroid (waiting for a photograph and flash cubes... I can't do it, too many memories). Digital firsts. The beautiful reflexes.
Forget everything.
Mobile photography has been making great strides in recent years, allowing for great photos. Phone manufacturers are constantly developing more and more advanced cameras, which are also increasingly used to carry out large advertising campaigns. The ecosystem that is being created around mobile photography is huge, and I think it will eventually engulf everything.
The photo is mobile
On his Instagram profile, the professional photographer Russell Preston Brown it shows some absolutely crazy photos. Look at this:
Used equipment? An iPhone 13 Pro Max, a bluetooth flash and a couple of apps. The workflow? After taking the photo with the Profoto Camera app, he used Adobe Lightroom Mobile to make some edits. The output images? In Raw format, to have greater control over the whole process. The post-production? With artificial intelligence: today "limited" to a few operations, tomorrow on all aspects of the photo. Even with the ability to invent or reconstruct elements of it.
I could give dozens of other examples.
Integrated photography
We brought kilos and kilos of equipment with us, right from the daguerreotype. We needed them to produce the images, then we needed other structures to develop them. Gradually, over the decades, we have reduced the load.
Today, if I were to tell you that in the near future I imagine a photographer with such "dedicated" equipment, I would tell you something I don't think so.
With one smartphone we carry around cameras and computers to process them. The future of photography is here before us: and it is computational, there is no other way.
In the coming years, all advertising campaigns, international journalistic photography awards, and all sorts of images will be created with a smartphone, a compact tripod and a flash the size of a can. Point.
