Dan Chung’s Olympic Smartphone Photoblog ⇥ guardian.co.uk
Dan Chung is taking photos at the Olympics using only his iPhone 4S, a pair of binoculars, and Snapseed. The photos he’s shooting are pretty great. Not “good for a smartphone”, but really damn good photos. Yet it reminds me of Marco Arment’s article on the limitations of this setup:
The Rebel photos look decent. The 5D Mark II photos look great. But photos from the iPhone 4, and even from the 4S, don’t hold up. They look fine on a 3.5-inch screen, but they look terrible on my big desktop monitor and abysmal on the Retina MacBook Pro.
Most of my favorite photos from the last two years only look good on small screens.
Dan Chung is almost certainly capturing many more photos with his Nikon, but the photos he’s shooting with the iPhone aren’t going to be broadly usable, especially with the lossy editing in Snapseed.
I love the challenge of shooting with an iPhone, and seeing surprising results. But I will always bring my DSLR with me if the photos I’ll be taking on that day need to last.