As a photographer with about 50 years under my belt, I have always felt a tug of war from how I started as a film photographer and the digital mobile world we live in today. What has been lost in photography? Is photography even real anymore?
YouTuber Arthur R posted a video called “Your Phone Is Not a Camera” that struck a chord. He argues in it that our smartphones have amazing imaging sensors, but they are still distraction-filled general-purpose computers, not tools for intentional focus. They fight for our attention, not sharpen it.
And that remark triggered a flood of vivid recollections from the 1980s and 1990s when photography was not a momentary flip of a glass screen but an uncompromising, sensory craft based on physical chemistry, the physics of light, and great patience.
The film medium had a permanency, an honesty. The emulsion on a celluloid basis, whether a single 35 mm still frame or continuous reels of motion picture stock, made a tangible chemical artifact. Photons actually hit tiny silver halide crystals, turning the crystal lattice into a latent picture, which would be fixed by developer chemicals. You could not just rub off or reshape or invent things on an already made negative without leaving telltale physical marks under a loupe or microscope: the negative was an irreversible, evidentiary record of reality. Conversely, digital images are just pliable streams of binary code. Pixel editors and generative neural networks are easy to manipulate with a matrix of ones and zeros. When we are able to use the weights from training to easily invent missing shadows, non-existent backdrops, or entire faces, our communal belief in the medium crumbles. In an age of synthetic pixels, digital photos carry an unavoidable cloud of doubt and plausible deniability, robbing the medium of its claim to authenticity from afar.
The Discipline of Limited Perspective
My own photographic journey began not with endless digital bursts but with a simple 35mm Minolta X-300 SLR. To many young folks, Minolta as a brand no longer registers in your collective memory. The X-300 was an honest, manual-focus workhorse, providing a vivid split-image rangefinder in the viewfinder with aperture priority exposure. You had to respect the light on the camera. A roll of 135 film provided you with exactly twenty-four or thirty-six exposures, and each time you pressed the shutter, you paid an actual sum in money. You couldn’t blast through fifty frames of lunch to see which one looked best; you had to compose with intent, check your depth of field, and hold your breath against camera shake.
Then I searched for more grit, tonal fidelity, and purposeful composition in medium format. Moving up to a classic Mamiyaflex twin lens reflex (TLR) totally changed how I saw the world. The waist-level glass finder, from below, reversed the scene horizontally, and so the brain had to disconnect from the topic and see the frame as a purely abstract balance of light, shadow, and geometry. I shot some of my best commercial photos on it at the Big 4 accounting firm where I worked, and the photos made it into the firm’s publication. What amazed my colleagues was my photographic style—absolutely no studio lights or flashes, just available light. Since then, I have always been known for my high-key, available light photography.
Then the Bronica 645 appeared, a device that merged modular backs with razor-sharp Zenzanon lenses. Loading 120 rolls of film into a Bronica back took trained precision, threading the paper backing tautly across the take-up spool under low light to avoid edge fogging. One roll produced only fifteen exquisite frames. No room for sloppiness.
Eventually, that unquenchable curiosity led to the conscious ascent to the top of the craft: a large-format view camera. With 4×5 sheet film you had to go under a heavy black cloth and wrestle with bellows extension, tilts, shifts, and the Scheimpflug principle to get the plane of focus and perspective distortion you wanted. Single-sheet films were inserted into double dark slides in complete darkness. It was slow and physically difficult and quite meditative.
The Crucible of Machine Measurement
In those analog decades, exposure was not a hidden computer algorithm quietly calculating multi-frame HDR stacks. It was an empirical science. A handheld incident and spot light meter, whether a Sekonic or a Gossen, was an invaluable extension of the photographer’s hand. You took a reading of the ambient light on your subject, the deep shadows and the brilliant highlights, and you made a conscious decision of where each tone should fall according to Ansel Adams’ Zone System.
And then the waiting game. After the students were done with an assignment or a field trip, the rolls were taken to professional photo laboratories. There are no quick previews or histograms. You lived with your uncertainties for twenty-four or forty-eight hours until the contact sheets and negatives were available.
Delayed pleasure is the best instructor anyone could ask for. When an image came back underexposed, or slightly out of focus, or damaged by wrong developing times, you had only yourself to blame. You wrote your errors down in real notebooks, you rectified your metering skills, and you built up a second-nature, instinctual awareness of how light works on glass and silver halide crystals.
From Physical Capture to Algorithmic Painting
Compare such a disciplined background with the snap culture of today’s smartphone. Today’s flagship phones have tiny sensors with incredible computational silicon. The virtual shutter button does not often cause a single actual exposure of light to fall on a focus plane. Instead, it takes a rolling buffer of raw frames, performs machine-learning denoisers, synthesizes false depth maps to blur backgrounds, inserts synthetic sky textures, and balances dynamic range with predictive tone curves.
It is obviously convenient and technically astounding, this computational magic. It levels the playing field for memory capture and serves out snappy and vibrant visuals in virtually any lighting condition. But it changes the medium underneath. The word “photography” literally means “sketching with light,” from the Greek “phos” and “graphê.” But today’s mobile picture production is mostly closer to hyper-realism painting. The end product is not a captured slice of optical reality but an idealized statistical collage created by neural networks to pleasure the eye.
The human agency of picture-making eventually recedes when every capture is artificially sharpened, adjusted, and smoothed to algorithmic perfection. Switching back to an intentional camera—maybe an older digital body with manual settings or a traditional mechanical film camera—slows us down, forces us to get creative with limits, and really examine our environment. True craft has never been about pixel counts. It is in the patience to wait for the light, the discipline to choose your time, and the quiet joy of making every frame count.
So, the question is, do you still believe your smartphone is a camera, capturing photos? Or is it merely a fascimile of photography, and more akin to painting? Are you storing memories? Or are you storing art?
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Dr Seamus Phan – Global C-suite Publicist & Strategist (Biochemist, Cybersecurity & Webdev pioneer, Author, Journalist) with nearly 40 years of professional field experience. Some articles are reproduced at McGallen & Bolden, where he is CTO and Head of Content. Visit him on LinkedIn.