I found out that if you treat your phone like a proper camera, you get proper photos

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We get one argument that smartphones are the future of photography, another is that they are rubbish. Who’s right?

Smartphone photography
(Image credit: Rod Lawton)

Technology evangelists are just the worst, right? You get a kind of blinkered, belief-driven tribalism that attacks any other viewpoint on sight. Oh boy. So here goes...

Even the best camera phones are not as good as real cameras – fact. The sensors are too small to compete on image quality and the lens choices are too muddled by multiple camera arrays, megapixel marketing and computational claptrap. 

And yet smartphones are still capable of taking rather good photographs. So how does that work?

Well, it’s because photography is about more than just image quality. It’s also about the skill of the photographer. It’s knowing where to stand, how to compose an image, how to ‘read’ the light and how to choose the perfect moment. The fact is, smartphones do achieve a certain acceptable base level of satisfactory image quality, so that if you have all these other skills then you can use them to capture great images.

It might not seem that way. You might see countless awful smartphone images, a similar number of great ‘proper’ camera photos and conclude that smartphones are terrible. But don’t forget that the users are very different. Smartphone users are not skilled in the same way that camera users are.

So what happens if you bring proper camera techniques to shooting with a smartphone? Well I think you get proper photographs. I’ll offer you some examples, if I may. They’re all taken on an iPhone 13 Pro Max, a positive antique by today’s smartphone standards, but that doesn’t matter. It’s quite good enough.

I took this with my iPhone's Noir filter. The inbuilt HDR kept the sky under control and a light graduated filter (Lightroom) at the top of the image produced a classic black and white feel. Does it matter that it was taken on a phone? Only if I want to print bigger than A4. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

Bright skies are tricky for cameras. You need to expose carefully, shoot raw, and bring the sky back in post. Not so much with my phone. It is only 12MP – I know – but this just came straight from the camera. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

Sometimes only a panorama will do. With a camera, you face a bit of work shooting and some more work later in your photo editor; with an iPhone you just, well, pan – and it's done. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

The ambient light was moonlight and it looked beautiful. I didn't want to head back to the car to get my tripod and camera so I did this on my phone handheld. I wish my camera(s) could do this. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

I love black and white. But B&W is not simply about technical quality. It's also about atmosphere, light, composition and tonality. My phone did well here. My camera was back at home because I didn't know I would need it. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

Smartphones are bad in low light, right? Well someone needs to tell Apple (and Samsung and Huawei) because this looks good to me. Also, nobody minds smartphones in museums and theatres and monuments, but cameras can make security twitchy. (Image credit: Rod Lawton)

Smartphones do have some technical advantages of their own. My iPhone can capture a seamless high-resolution panoramic image in-camera, on the spot, whereas if I do it with a proper camera I have to stitch the frames later in software. My iPhone’s in-camera on-the-spot HDR is more effective than any in-camera HDR. My iPhone can also capture noise-free hand-held multi-frame low-light exposures in a way that none of my cameras can.

The most important thing for me is that I ‘see’ the world differently with my iPhone. I capture images with a spontaneity, invention and immersion that doesn’t come naturally with a camera. It’s as if the pressure’s off. I can just concentrate on the image itself, not a thousand and one camera settings that I might have forgotten to get right. Oh, and my phone’s screen is twice the size of my camera’s, and its stabilization is in a different league.

So my point is that smartphone cameras are not as good as ‘real’ cameras in a technical sense  – of course they aren’t – but very often they are still good enough to take good photographs, as long as you give your phone the same respect that you give your camera. 

Check out our guide to the best camera phones in 2025

Rod Lawton
Rod Lawton
Contributor

Rod is an independent photography journalist and editor, and a long-standing Digital Camera World contributor, having previously worked as DCW's Group Reviews editor. Before that he has been technique editor on N-Photo, Head of Testing for the photography division and Camera Channel editor on TechRadar, as well as contributing to many other publications. He has been writing about photography technique, photo editing and digital cameras since they first appeared, and before that began his career writing about film photography. He has used and reviewed practically every interchangeable lens camera launched in the past 20 years, from entry-level DSLRs to medium format cameras, together with lenses, tripods, gimbals, light meters, camera bags and more. Rod has his own camera gear blog at fotovolo.com but also writes about photo-editing applications and techniques at lifeafterphotoshop.com

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