When I was a kid, I never had much of an interest in photography. Like most kids, I had intermittent experiences with Kodak cameras on field trips and family vacations, but little beyond that.
In middle school and high school I had beginner digital media classes, but the cameras we would use always had a few too many buttons for me to make proper sense of. Growing up, I had always had difficulty with multi-step processing and it was an ineptitude I felt in full force when I tried getting comfortable with any of this more complicated camera equipment. It wasn’t until I owned a cellphone that I ever actually took a picture for the fun of it.
When cellphones first began to include cameras, though, their abilities were limited. They could take pictures, but they were hardly anything worth saving. But those first low resolution images that I shot on my phone were incredibly exciting to me.
It wouldn’t be until years later that I’d have a phone with the ability to record videos. And once I finally did, the videos that it took could hardly catch the vaguest of details. Not to mention, the video’s length maxed out at a meager fifteen seconds. And cellphone storage was limited at best. Even with the limitations, though, it was the first time I could create memories on the device I carried everywhere. And simply.
By the time I got my first iPhone, I was able to take pictures that could shoot the environment around me in stunning clarity. At least in 2011, the clarity felt stunning. I was able to take pictures everywhere I went without worrying about the remaining space on my phone. Phones had begun to traffic in gigabytes rather than megabytes. And even though they weren’t yet pictures worth hanging on a fridge, they truly seized the details of places in time. They preserved memories. The first cameras that our phones included were mere gimmicks by comparison.
The sheer simplicity of the camera program that Apple offered, too, opened up a world that had previously felt closed off to me. The user interface is so straightforward that even toddlers can take passable pictures.
And while the camerawork I was doing on my phone was still far from breath-taking, it had grown so second nature that it forced me to transition from someone who doesn’t take photos into someone who does.
By the time I got an iPhone 11 Pro, though, these phones in our pockets had grown from proficient to nothing short of magnificent. Suddenly, these pocketable phones had three separate lenses for three separate purposes.
They had telephoto cameras. They had wide angle lenses. They could encapsulate more of their environment than even the professional cameras of a decade prior. They could draw detail from dark environments with staggering levels of clarity. Suddenly, these phones in our pockets could reproduce our night time world.
I began taking pictures all of the time. And the pictures I was taking felt not just as though they captured the environments that I was in, but that they could actually show their nuance — for the first time.
Even pictures of the mundane began to appear boastworthy.
I could record the insects on the ground and the individual veins of the leaves that they crawled over. That I could take these pictures and videos on the device I carried with me everywhere opened up the floodgates for me.
Before I had a professional camera in my pocket, it had hardly occurred to me that I could actually take photos worth looking at. With the emergence of this technology though, picture-taking quickly became a part of my daily life. I was looking at the world in new ways. Every day was an opportunity to shoot the beauty in the world around me.
Winter walks grew into something more exciting once I had a phone that could capture their desiccated allure. The insides of flowers opened up with life once I had a phone that could do them justice.
For three consecutive years, the camera hardly ever managed to disappoint me. Through falls on pavement to long treks in lint covered pockets to water damaged baths in rice, for three entire years that phone soaked in the entire world around me. Even as the phone itself began to show its age, the camera continued on as strong as ever. I still use it today even now that I’ve updated once again.
This past September, I got the latest iPhone. Given how incredible the photos I was taking on the 11 Pro were, it was difficult to justify the purchase of a 12 or 13. But with the release of the 14 Pro, it felt as though Apple had offered another groundbreaking leap forward in the world of cellphone photography.
The macro lens photography I was doing quickly grew to look as though it was only a modest step below National Geographic.
The time lapse videos that I could capture of sunsets, sunrises and seasonal changes amazed me. I could finally shoot videos while in motion.
On the 11 Pro, the videos I would record while moving at any significant speed at all would render the videos nearly unwatchable. Without a gimbal or a tripod, the stabilization ability just wasn’t there yet. But with the release of Action Mode on the iPhone 14, the paradigm had shifted once again.
With this new update, I could chase my puppy around the yard and capture his ear-flopping, hair-bouncing, leaping, dashing revelry in all of its glory. I could draw personality from a video that wouldn’t have been possible only the year prior. It inspired me to buy a tripod and begin really taking this photography project of mine seriously.
Now, the pictures and videos I was taking weren’t just worth showing to family and friends anymore; they were worth selling. I started to put more time and energy than ever before into my photography.
I still have a long way to go before I can call myself a professional photographer. But the amount that I’ve learned through perpetual trial and error with this device that hardly ever leaves my side is difficult for me to overstate. This iPhone in my pocket inspired a love of photography that probably have never emerged without it.
For more of my photos and to see some of my time lapse work, check out my instagram page here!