Credit: Gabriele Barni
Late 2011 was a period of big changes for me. I had just finished up college, an internship, and landed my first `big boy` job at Puget Sound Energy doing photo and video for their communications department. It was also around this time that I got my very first smartphone, an act which would forever change my perspectives on photography.
Okay, well, it was my second smartphone that did that. My first was a Blackberry Bold, which was a Puget Sound Energy company phone, and I very briefly thought that it was amazing. I was wrong. You see, wanting to keep my work and personal life somewhat separate, I figured I should purchase my own smartphone for personal use. So I picked up a just-released iPhone 4S, and the Blackberry felt prehistoric in comparison.
With a decent camera in my pocket at all times, I of course started an Instagram account and promptly put a photo of a bagel sandwich up for all the world to see. Yes, this is literally the first image on my Instagram profile, and it`s probably damaging my credibility to this day.
A lot of people credit cell phone cameras with the death of the compact camera, but I think the iPhone 4S was one of the first cell phones with quality that could really rival the PowerShots and Coolpix`s of the day. In high school, VGA camera phones were all the rage, but a lot of us still carried around a dedicated compact camera for `real` photos.*
But with the iPhone 4S, you got an 8MP sensor, a reasonably fast F2.4 lens, 1080p HD video recording and a Retina high-density display that was probably the best display I`d ever seen up until that point. Suddenly, for an average consumer to get appreciably better image quality, you had to step up to a reasonably high-end camera, and that`s why I think the iPhone 4S was the final nail in the compact camera`s coffin.**
Of course the Sony RX100 came out the following summer and, though it did inspire eventual competition and somew ...
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