Read me first: technology is making photography better, not worse

The phone I bought last month has a camera supposedly better than the camera I bought four years ago. That's to say it has a 5MP camera instead of a 4MP one. I could have bought a Samsung phone with 8MP, the same as my second digital camera. And the phone does take perfectly usable pictures and recognisable videos. That it functions as well as a mapping device and a recorder is astonishing, but irrelevant to this argument. My cameras will do none of those other things. When I want to take a close-up with the most recent, and expensive, DSLR, I have to go to the trouble of changing the lens first. The phone - and the previous camera - do it all in software. This is all part of a revolution that has put good photography in the hands of everyone. Yet the paradox of digital photography has been that the standards of publicly... [read full story]