What Goes Around...

I was pondering earlier - before Wales' inevitable defeat to South Africa this afternoon [Rugby Union Autumn Internationals] - on the nature of visual perception, at least in relation to photography, as it largely is today, on the smartphone: in this case the iPhone 16 Pro. The compound camera on the latter is an optical wonder in and of itself, but what the phone's firmware and software do with its input beggars belief to be frank. At the very simplest level, you can actually set the f-stop of a given lens without there being any physical form of f-stop: it's all calculated by the AI engine built into the hardware of the phone. It allows you to isolate foreground objects against their background with differential focus: all at the soft/firm/hardware level. Coupled with an actual and astonishingly good 5x optical zoom, a choice of lens focal lengths, and a heinously good macro setting, and you've got a very strong contender for an actual, proper tool camera here.

What crossed my mind however, was the thought that all the under the hood intervention by insanely clever hardware and software, is in some way getting in the way of the direct connection between the photographer and the photograph itself: in some way making a good deal of the resulting image up by itself. To a degree of course, that's the reality of it: making great images with a smartphone, particularly this one, is made infinitely easier. That has been true of course of every iteration of the technology of photographic image making, from its very earliest days; but one might argue that the level of machine intervention present today is impacting on the creative level of the process, offering a degree of inbuilt correction hitherto impossible, and making 'subjective' decisions on the fly on behalf of the photographer themself.

Two things spring to mind here: one is the level of allowable personal intervention in the operation of the iPhone's camera functions, which are legion. Individual decision-making still rules the roost however, and you can customise settings to your hearts desire, much in the same way that photographers have always tweaked the technology of their day to suit their ends. Second is the undeniable fact that, remarkable as the human organ of sight - the eye - is, it is in fact optically, woefully simple in its construction: a kind of biological Box Brownie camera [Google that reference, anyone younger than about sixty] with a much simpler lens. On its own, the eye produces a crude, upside-down image of the outside world, rather than what we might expect to be the widescreen cinematographic view we take for granted in real life and in the media we all avidly consume without even thinking about it.

Not the case. Without the intervention of our inbuilt firmware and self-evolving software, processed through the most complex parallel computing hardware in existence - the brain - we would be trapped in a world of vague and poorly-focussed visual cues, amounting to stuttering shapes and tones without form or meaningful structure: our brains construct the picture of the world we inhabit by interpolating the raw data thrown at it by our eyes [and our other organs]. These simple optical devices are elevated into an incredible information gathering system by our brains alone.

The realisation that I've come to today, though, is that not only are the two systems - the iPhone camera and the human 'camera' - very similar in the way they function vis à vis the way they interpolate mountains of data to make sense of it; but that the technological solution that is the iPhone is in itself the offspring of the human mind itself. We created the camera to extend our own sight in the first place: the iPhone 16 Pro and its ilk are simply the natural progression of that desire. Nicely circular, methinks. And by the way, a great photographer will always make great photographs, whatever the kit; but they will always welcome ways of making the path to their great images easier. It's all in the eye - and the brain - the equipment is, and always will be, the servant of human creativity.