The best camera for the job

In a corner of my spare room lives a bag, a large black rucksack to be exact, and in this bag live my cameras. Not normal sized compact or mobile phone sized cameras. That large rucksack contains full size cameras, with grips, lens, flash guns, cables and the assorted bit and pieces that can accumulate when you have an interest in photography.

Over the years I've used this collection of cameras to take some photographs that I'm proud of, but the problem with big cameras is that they need big bags to carry them, and that size is pretty much the main reason why those big cameras tend to stay in that bag in the spare room at home. They're just too big to carry with me every day.

What you can do with a big camera

Until recently you had to make a conscious decision to have a cameras with, but all that had changed in the last few years. While the first cameras fitted to phones were of particularly poor quality, the cameras fitted to the latest phones aren't just good by phone standards, they're good by camera standards.

But as great as the cameras in our phones are now, I believe that the real shift in photography is that those great cameras are now attached to surprisingly powerful computers. The photograph above was taken with an expensive digital SLR with an expensive lens and post processed on a desktop computer. The photograph below was taken and processed on my smartphone.

Shot, processed and published with an iPhone

The capability of the modern phone should not be underestimated. We now have the ability to take high quality photographs, post-process them and then publish them to the world, and all this in a device that many of us were already carrying in our pockets. While the move from chemical to digital photography had a profound effect on process of taking photographs, the ability to publish photos in a instant will have a greater effect.

When US Airways flight 1549 ditched in the Hudson river in January 2009, the first reports of the incident did not come from the established media organisations, it was reported on Twitter by Janis Krums, a New York commuter who happened to be on one of the first ferries that responded to the ditched aircraft. Using just his mobile phone he was able to take and publish a photo that was seen by millions round the world within minutes of pressing the shutter on his iPhone

There's a famous adage in photography that the best camera for the job is the one you have with. Now that we can process and publish those photos using the same camera that adage was never truer.