siamesecatmanuk Loc: Leicestershire UK

Maybe it's just the mood I woke up in this morning, but I was hurt reading this,did my photos of cats upset someone ?
Graham

Robert1 Loc: Davie, FL

If you want to know why, you would have to ask the camera makers as to why that is in that their business decisions do not care to cater to today's younger generations as part of their business strategies.

They probably think that the young do not matter much because they do not carry the same economic weight that older, economically established people do.Just a guess, who knows.

All I know is that they are shooting themselves in the foot if I were to go by the way I'm experiencing the situation through the mirror that my daughters and their friends apathy and lack of care towards cameras in general reflects back to me. So once again ask the camera makers.

Fredrick Loc: Former NYC, now San Francisco Bay Area

Before smartphones with cameras, there was always a small subset of the population that were photographers. Just as there is today.

50 years ago, if you were the slightest bit interested in photography you bought an SLR and a couple of lenses and used it for many many years. Today with DSLR’s and MILC’s there’s a different upgrade every few months. Most people can’t afford to keep upgrading their camera systems. I also think one of the reasons for the decrease in sales of DSLR’s ( besides the popularity of MILC’s) is the availability of great P&S cameras and bridge cameras. Some of them are just incredible.

My 17 year old great niece took a photography course last year in high school, has an iPhone, and guess what she asked her parents for, for Christmas ... a Mirrorless Camera. She loves it.

Us photographers are still out there!

blackest Loc: Ireland

There are limitations to cell phone cameras, without a doubt and there are limitations with regular cameras too.
There is a big difference in the content of the photo's, with a camera phone you are working up close with people not photographing an eagles nest. If you are on a night out you are hardly likely going to carry a good camera to get a beer knocked over it.

You can be part of an event with a cell phone camera, you're more likely to be an observer with a regular camera.
Did you know you don't even need to be holding a cell phone camera to use it?
Filmic pro can control one iphone camera with a second iphone.

Lets say you have a bird table, you could have one set on the table, and you can operate that camera out of sight of the birds. The iphone has an ip67 rating that can handle immersion in water to 1 meter, you can shoot in the rain without risking killing your camera.

You can even use gaffer tape to put your camera places you wouldn't even risk a regular camera.

There are some brilliant opportunities that are open to you with these very light weight and sophisticated cameras.
There is a whole laundry list of what you can do with a dslr or m43 camera that you can't do with a cell phone camera of course.

User ID

Amen.

Soooooo many users think these forums
are mainly about advice and technique !
What's really here is 90% entertainment
and 10% semi-useful advice. Those who
don't catch the entertainment value are
shortchanging themselves.

Now, I'm NO WAY suggesting we should
not take our little spats and religiously
held bogus ideas seriously. No way. It's
taking it all seriously that provides the
entertainment. Gotta keep perspective !
Gotta keep arguing about whether the
new R and Z are causing the demise of
the wet plate.

.

jdedmonds

Hear hear! I have 2386 real books and thousands of LPs. The latter come alive in ways otherwise impossible through a Marantz 2275 and JBL200B studio masters.

jdedmonds

photos, not photo's. Apostrophe not for making nouns plural.

User ID

Mebbe he's going stricklee by the rules.

The apostrophe would then be required
for the missing letters in "photographs".
So it's not a plural. It's a contraction :-)

.

jdedmonds

Huh?

Robert1 Loc: Davie, FL

"My 17 year old great niece took a photography course last year in high school, has an iPhone, and guess what she asked her parents for, for Christmas ... a Mirrorless Camera. She loves it.

Us photographers are still out there!
Fredrick"

Of course we are. And every generation have a percentage interested in photography. Like I say in my original post my youngest first ever SLR was the Pentax K50 and two lenses of her choice. But, per this tread about the dwindling of photo sales, it troubles me, as I see it reflected on my daughters' peers and the general population in young people today. I don't see any major camera maker making a concerted effort to attract the young people that comes behind us.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Just be thankful I am not shooting a Cannon.

User ID

`



Well, if you cannot parse that, you
got no cred as a Grammar Cop. So
please surrender your shield.

.

Bipod

Possibly. The problem is, the camera industry needs to get that market back or there will
have to be drastic downsizing (and probably some companies exiting the consumer camera biz).

Is a Tonka truck "better" than Freightliner? Well, it's a better toy...

Every Kodak Instamatic except the Pocket Instamatic (which used 110 film) was "Full Frame".
Smart phone sensors are all tiny -- some as small as 1/4". None that I'm aware of larger than
1/3.2" (5.68 mm x 4.64 mm -- the Apple iPhone 5). That's smaller than the Standard 8 mm frame
(5.94 mm x 4.8 mm)!

In cameras, size matters, because its impossible to focus light to an infinitely small point.
If nothing else, it is limited by diffraction. And smaller the physical diameter of the
aperture, the greater the diffration.

And aperture diameter is tied to focal length, which is tied to format. f/64 is sharp on a
8" x 10 view camera--on a 35 mm it would be a pinhole -- mucho diffraction.

Of course, if you never enlarge, you'll never notice how unsharp the image is. My impression
is that most smart phone users look at the image one (on the phone's screen), then delete it.
They never actually produce a photograph.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Diffraction is a problem when the aperture gets too small and the smaller the sensor the larger the aperture you need to use in order not to get diffraction.

This is where the cell phone camera designers have been quite clever they use a fixed aperture of typically f1.7 - F2.4 this manages to keep diffraction small enough that it isn't visible when the photo is enlarged, F64 is fine on large format due to the limited magnification that will be applied. It is really nice engineering. They also have a base iso of 25 and iso 200 is about where noise becomes visible, those tiny photo sites can't collect much light but the fast lens makes that quite useable. Since the focal length is around 3mm the depth of field is massive.

Obviously the limitations of a cell phone camera, mean a dslr will handle low light better and having 1 or 2 fixed lenses limits the kind of photographs you can take. But they are quite capable for a lot of photos, that non photographers want to take.

SteveR Loc: Michigan

Sure. Looks great on a computer, which cell phones are great for, but what about prints? They have their limitations.

With all the amateurs moving to cellphones for their photography and sharing their photos via cellphone and facebook, real photography will return to a smaller more dedicated group as it was once before. Is that a bad thing?