Everywhere I go I see people taking photos with phones. Sometimes I see people using SLR’s but most of the time it’s phones. What does this spell out for the future of regular cameras? Will the P&S cameras go away in 5-10 years? Will you not be able to buy a pro camera at Best Buy but only online? Let’s speculate.
I mean I love my SX740HS Canon. It has a big manual and loads of features and certainly far more than my iPhone 12 or iPad Mini 5.
I don't speculate, because there's really nothing to speculate about how one should take photographs. Let's take another technology that had gone through a similar transformation. It's called a telephone. When Alexander Graham Bell and Antonio Meucci brought out the concept of a telephone, did both them conceived the fact that today, the telephone is really a smartphone? Nope they didn't and neither did hundreds of years when people use the telephone that they did not foresee the day that you don't even need a landline or even a cell phone provider to talk to other people on the phone. When just using an app like Whatsapp, Fongo, SoftPhone, Skype etc would allow you to connect to billions of people around the world. In fact, 20 years ago, I got laughed at by many people when I said people will dump their land lines and use a cellphone. But of course today, there's nothing to laugh about having no land line, because the majority of people today had shifted to having a cell line as their only line. What a significant progress telephone went through to come to this day. What we had just witnessed is the digitization of telephony and also allowing the successful transition from office work to working from home. And yet the same with photography, there are some people who still insist in owning a land line, the traditionislts. This number, however, is small.
Well, it's no different now with photography. Photography has also gone through a similar transformation from physical product of photography into the digitization of photography.
What is photography? In its basic form, photography allows the sharing of one's factual and/or creative vision to the masses through film, print and today via social media like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr etc.. Before the digitization of photography, photography is a difficult art to master because the equipment weren't as automated as they are today. You need skills and knowledge. To some, this becomes a trade and with a trade comes the mastery of that trade. This is what we see today with people who use a SLR or a DSLR; it is the continuation of the mastery of the photography trade, the innate skills necessary to create unique visions. However, the ideology in photography that is generally accepted today is about mastering the trade and you can see this with people who sell professional equipment, run Youtube shows about professional equipment and educating the public in how to getter better photos. In essence, photography to them is an art form, a trade that they strive to achieve higher mastery. And in order to achieve that higher mastery, they would need to have more manual control on their equipment; more granular adjustments with their software. So that's the group we see today that use professional equipment which also includes an iPhone.
And then, we have another bigger group of people. These people are only interested in recording and sharing the photos and videos. And because of the digitization of photography with iPhones and Android phones, many of the skills photographers used to need to learn like lighting, exposure, focus, depth of field are now fully automated through apps and the neural engine of the Apple's Bionic chip. The computer does all of the heavy lifting and the user only needs to snap a photo. These people have only a desire to share, to make a name for themselves but they do not consider themselves needing to go beyond automation as they are content with automation. This is the majority of the group you see today. And just like a telephone, you will see a small number of photographers who plow and perfect their photographic trade, being professional and pro-photographers. They're like the land line for telephones.
Why then do we still see people use a DSLR? It's the ideology behind using the DSLR that keeps people buying a DSLR or a serious camera. When that ideology in using a DSLR is replaced completely with just an automated computer app or artificial intelligence where anyone can use it to create professional photographs in place of a human being is when it becomes pointless to compete with a machine.
That's what happened with the digitization of telephony. Currently, there is this ideology that stipulates one can only get better photos with a DSLR. But who created this ideology and why do you think this ideology will and can stand the test of time? It's obvious that fewer and fewer people are accepting this type of ideology that you should need a DSLR or a mirrorless camera to take better and more professional photos as shown with the shrinking sales of professional cameras and the shrinking sales of conventional telephone.
