Movin’ On Up, From Phones to Cameras!

We love our phones, right? They take great pictures: sharp, vivid, often with greater detail than the ones taken by cameras! Why on earth would we want to move up from a phone to a camera? You can put a phone on your hip, in a pocket or a purse. Cameras are big and heavy and expensive and a pain to lug around in a bag! Right?

Right! But a camera is still capable of doing things no smartphone can do. It can stop time, it can see in the dark, freeze the wings of a hummingbird, make all the moving people in a train station disappear, turn waterfalls into misty clouds or into a million little ice pellets, make small rooms look big, convert pounding surf into a soft cloud settling on the beach, turn your kids into ghosts in a graveyard or in a haunted house, quickly capture candid expressions on the faces of your family as they gather together, move the moon across the sky, and record memories of your past in exquisite detail.

With the flick of the “On” button as you raise it to your eyes, a camera is ready to shoot instantly to capture that fleeting moment when your infant suddenly begins to walk, or a great white shark suddenly leaps out of the water. Contrast this to the multi-second delay caused by reaching into your pocket, turning on the phone, typing in a password, swiping to the camera icon, and then, finally pushing the shutter button!

In this 2 hour zoom session with illustrations, Paris-trained architectural photographer E. David. Luria, director of the popular Washington Photo Safari, gives us many reasons why we should move up, not replacing our phone, but adding to our photographic options by also using a camera with variable modes and interchangeable lenses. At the end, Mr. Luria says: “Don’t divorce your phone, marry it to your camera!” pointing out how the best images can actually be taken by a camera tethered to a phone!