SMARTPHONE VS. SLR

While there is a great level of debate about what the best camera is, and there will never a definitive answer, a common answer is “the camera that you have with you.” This is because you often never know when the perfect shot or ideal moment is going to arise. This means that for many people, the perfect camera is the one that they have on them, and in the modern era, this would suggest that the smartphone, as opposed to a traditional camera, is the best type of camera.

As you can imagine though, this isn’t an opinion that many people agree with. There is a sense that the art of photography is dying, or at least waning with the masses. More and more photographs are being taken but so many aspects of photography are falling. The care and attention that goes into getting the perfect shot and the focus and attention that is showered on a great image are no longer present for many people. With selfies being the most common form of photography these days and social media sites providing a platform for people to dump images where they are forgotten about by the next day due to the next influx of images, it is easy to see why so many people are concerned about the current health of photography.

However, there is also going to be a need for the high-end and professional cameras that help direct news coverage and give the masses insight into the life of their favourite celebrities. This means that the cameras and style of photography most under threat these days are the point and shoot cameras. With filters and other elements of assistance helping inexperienced photographers to capture and frame images in a way that they would never have been able to before, there is a middle ground being removed from the camera industry.

Then again, are people who live their life and their most special moments through a view-finder or the other side of a lens really taking everything in? There have been studies into the fact over whether taking photographs of an image or a moment becomes the more predominant memory as opposed to the memory itself. It can be fun to look back on images of special occasions but people who spent the entire day or event behind a smartphone may find that they don’t recall too much of the engagement and interaction of the day.