Since the invention of the first DSLR around the turn of the millennium cameras have been getting more powerful, smaller and faster. As the technology has advanced we have started to see cameras moving down from digital compact cameras to tiny little things that can be integrated with other portable devices, the most common being mobile phones. For me this brings us into a really interesting space, everyone has a camera with them all of the time.
Now mobile phone cameras may not be the most powerful or well built cameras but they certainly are useful little things. If you can learn to work within its limitations you can get some good stuff. Nokia are bringing out a new phone called the N86, they even have a little advanced preview in dpreview (for those that don’t know they do a lot of bench testing of camera hardware). One of the things I have been quite interested in for a while is how you can make good images with a low quality camera, and the mobile phone is certainly a good place to start playing around with this idea. The iPhone is also bringing a new dimension into the digital phone photography world, with in-phone image editing apps. Some of these apps, although limited, can provide a wide range of different effects and if used well can completely negate the need to use a computer to edit the photos. Photos can even be published online directly from the phone, so the images may never need to touch a computer before they are published to potentially millions of people to see.
All the photos in this post have come out of my little Nokia 6300’s 2 mega pixel camera, and I wouldn’t have been able to capture any of them with out it.