Apple has heavily touted the camera capabilities of the iPhone 6/iPhone 6s and iPhone 6 Plus/iPhone 6s Plus since the first introduction of the devices in 2014. The company ran a worldwide ad campaign called “Shot on iPhone” that showcased some of the beautiful photographs taken with iPhones. Now, the Chief Official White House Photographer has shared a collection of images that he took throughout 2015 with his iPhone.
In a post on Medium, Pete Souza shared that throughout the year he took a handful of images around The White House with his iPhone as opposed to his DSLR. Over the course of the year, he shared a plethora of images on his Instagram account, but never disclosed which were taken with a DSLR and which were taken with his iPhone. Now, Souza has said that any images shared in the square format were taken with an iPhone.
Scrolling through Souza’s Instagram you can see that there isn’t a huge discrepancy in quality between any of his images, again showing how truly great the iPhone camera has gotten over the past two years.
My approach to my Instagram feed continues to be all square photos are taken with an iPhone, and full-frame horizontals and verticals are taken with a DSLR (usually a Canon 5DMark3, but I’ve also posted some from Sony, Nikon and Leica cameras).
Souza has shared many of his iPhone-taken White House images in his Medium post and we’ve uploaded some below, as well. Souza also shared some images that he processed with the popular Hipstamatic iOS app.
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The iPhone 6S+ phone is simply amazing…. Yes, it has some limitations, but you get creative and work around them, the result being beautiful pictures off a phone. A phone. And don’t get me started about the 4K video which comes off the same phone. Simply awesome.
OK, the camera in the iPhone gets better every year, but any camera could have taken these photos and there’s no comparison (ever) between the photos of any iPhone and a DSLR. Even referring to “DSLR” (or a particular DSLR) in the same paragraph, let alone sentence, as “iPhone” is only evidence of utter stupidity.
Whoa Dude, chillax.
Yes any decent camera could of taken these pictures. Yes a pro grade DSLR might have taken better pictures. Nobody is arguing that. But they were taken with an iPhone, and that’s kinda cool. Not the sort of thing that shakes the world but it’s cool. Nothing more important than that.
Whoa Dude, you act like he insulted your mother. Actually you would not defend your mother like you do the iPhone.
This guy is just an angry douche bag. All they are saying is for a camera phone these photos are pretty damn impressive so relax!
I saw this photographer speak about his use of an iPhone in his photography campaigns. I think at the time it was just a 4S and he was yet to be the official white house photographer. I really like how he’s pushing the square format. When you think about how most of our photos are used these days, square is really the method by which we frame most of our images.
You are correct. Pete Souza was the “Official White House Photographer” from 1983 to 1989 (during Reagan’s presidency). I believe he became the “Chief Official Photographer” when President Obama got elected. Before that Eric Draper served as President Bush’s Chief Official Photographer for 8 years. Must be a nice gig. :)
Those are some seriously squeaky clean windows on airforce 1….🤔
I guess you just have to have an eye for it. I don’t know the ins and outs of Instagram but are images compressed when they are uploaded? Every photo posted above exhibits a lot of noise and compression artifacting. I guess it doesn’t really matter what format/camera you are using. Just take photos and post them up.
my iphone 6+ is amazing i have been doing pro photography on my iphone and people say wow what kind of camera do you have. im like well… its not a camera that is where its not on a phone, mine is my phone my phone takes really great photos, but you also have to have a good eye when taking the photos!
You make a very important point. It’s not the camera that takes a good picture, it’s the photographer. A good camera can make a good photographer better but can’t make a unskilled photographer good. On the other hand a talented photographer can use a mediocre camera and still take a good picture.
These stories always grate on me. I find an iPhone to be amazing when comparing with cell phone cameras from the distant past. Since 2010, with the introduction of backside illumination in the iPhone 4, iPhones have actually been comparable to point-and-shoot cameras from a decade ago (as long as you ignore the lack of an optical zoom), because point-and-shoot cameras suffered somewhat from wiring in front of the photosites, and newer cell phone cameras have BSI to mitigate that problem. Since then, Apple has let the pixel count creep upwards, and has made other incremental improvements. And the IS in the 6 Plus and 6S Plus is a welcome addition, though they really should have put it in the 6 and 6S, too.
But here’s the thing: anybody comparing an iPhone to a DSLR is either blind or has never used a recent DSLR. They’re simply not in the same league. They’re not in the same league as a 2003 crop-body DSLR, much less a current full-frame DSLR.
Let me put the differences between cell phones and DSLRs into perspective. A couple of hours ago, I photographed a wind surfer 18 minutes after official sundown with my Canon 6D (just 7.5 minutes before dusk, in the shadow of tall buildings). With an f/5.6 lens, I took a 1/160th second exposure at ISO 12,800 of someone a couple of hundred feet away. The camera focused easily, thanks to a cross-type focus point with -3 EV (~.029 foot-candle/.0026 lumen) sensitivity, and after digital cropping, the photo was actually marginally usable despite the absolutely absurdly bad shooting conditions. If I had used an iPhone, I would have needed a flash to shoot photos at all in such poor light.
Of course, in this particular case, I took that shot purely to show that I could, but the point is that I could. When you’re talking about pro photography, the difference between a DSLR and a cell phone is huge. It’s the difference between nailing almost every shot even under obscenely bad conditions and occasionally getting a usable shot under only moderately bad conditions. That’s what the big cameras buy you—consistency.
Now just to clarify, when I say pro photography, I mean non-studio, real-world pro photography, where not getting the shot means not getting paid. Pro photographers pulling out an iPhone as a publicity stunt to prove that they can successfully capture something with them means very little to me. What matters is the “potential keeper rate”—that is, the percentage of photos that (ignoring composition, subject matter, and timing mistakes) are of acceptable quality. Alternatively, if the photographer says, “I’d love to be able to get that shot, but I just can’t” and then doesn’t even bother trying to take the shot because he or she knows it isn’t possible, that counts against the potential keeper rate just as though the photographer had taken the unusable shot, because the net impact is the same.
It also isn’t very interesting to me when studio photographers pull out cell phones and use them for fashion photography outdoors or on a brightly lit runway. Comparing a cell phone to a DSLR under those conditions is like saying that a 1985 Ford Escort without air bags performs as well in crash tests as a new Ford Mustang when your testing occurs on a 10 MPH road through a school zone, assuming that the driver obeys the speed limit and crashes into water-filled barrels. It is like saying that an office refrigerator is just as good as a full-size refrigerator because the only thing you need to keep cold is a single six-pack of soda.
These sorts of tests simply don’t push the limits of what is possible. They don’t involve low-light photography. They don’t involve trying to achieve high subject isolation with fast lenses. They don’t involve capturing fast motion. They don’t require more than 8 stops of dynamic range (the maximum that you can capture in JPEG format) so that you can push that critical shot brighter by three stops because the light meter lied to you. In short, they don’t push the limits of the focusing system, the lens, the sensor, or the flash storage speed in any meaningful way. It should go without saying that an iPhone can shoot great photos under good conditions, and that a good photographer can choose shots to work within the limitations of the system. The more interesting question is what percentage of shots the photographer couldn’t get because of the limitations of the system.
So yes, I’m very impressed with how far they’ve come in just a few years. But I also recognize that most of that improvement came from going from capturing 30% of the light that hits the sensors to 80% (using BSI), and that you can’t get a further 30x improvement by going from 80% to 100%. We’re nearing the limits of what is physically possible without making the cell phones bigger. If you want them to truly be as good as DSLRs, physics requires them to be very nearly as big as DSLRs, and that’s just not going to fly. And anybody who thinks that they’re already as good (or even close) is delusional.