Curious if you have such a camera on your person every day? It’s an extra thing to charge, you can’t edit and post directly to social media, getting pictures backed up is not automatic. It’s a totally different experience and for most people, they don’t want to hang large prints of their photos at home. They just need enough quality to show their friends and family.
Firstly, I feel I got a bit swamped with replies to my initial comment. So I will try to address it all here.
I used to carry a small camera at all times in my bag, yes. Mostly a Canon G11 and at times an Olympus XA. But this was a long time ago as I no longer pass by any points of real interest (to me) on my commute.
But, let me get back to what I am trying to convey. From my perspective, phones on cameras (combined with social media) created a new class of photographers that would be most closely related to those that previously had cheap point-and-shoot cameras (if even a camera at all) with fixed lenses that are easy to operate but gets the job done to document something. The results will be subpar, but that does not matter as the point is not something abstract like “bokeh”, the desire is to document something visually to have it become a memory or communicate an event to someone else visually in a less artistic sense than a “real” photographer. This is why I find discussions about how digital depth of field is not authentic largely to miss the point. This class of photographers do not care, they want good aesthetics – yes – but it is not something they actively seek out like a “true” photographer.
But here is the kicker, I doubt that without a readily available camera in their phone these people would ever have become photographers in the first place and this is why the camera phone vs DSLR discussion annoys me. This new class of photographers did not make a conscious choice between shooting with a phone, point-and-shoot, mirrorless, or DSLR. They used what was already there to communicate and when a new camera phone comes around they enjoy the fact that they get better aesthetics out of it than their old one. In a sense, I doubt they even view their phone as a camera in the first place.
So, it is a spectrum ranging from camera phone up to medium format madness. But I think most of these discussions are had by the 5% such as myself (and yourself) that consider weight, dynamic range, glass, etc. Rather than the 95% who probably do not even perceive themselves as photographers in the first place – although they certainly are.
