I'll bet you right now that you have a cell phone.
No seriously, almost everyone has one these days. In fact I'm posting this from my iPhone 4 right now, and I wrote a post a few days ago from my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (for those of you that don't know, it's the equally priced, yet larger and better res screened android equivalent and #1 competitor of the iPad 2)
Do you remember wayyyyy back when there were no iPhones, and all you could do when you were waiting in line or taking a long plane ride was just sit there and stare into the distance, imagining how cool a little 5-inch piece of glass that could do everything for you would be?
Welcome to the future! And though we may not have flying cars, cyborg butlers, taxi drivers from planet x, and people making the morning commute by jetpack, our technology still amazingly advanced. Think about it, did you hear about the new Railgun the US Military is developing? Nearly the stuff of fiction!
But while railguns are proprietary military technology, don't just think we were left behind by the techno train; just think about some of the futuristic consumer technology we have today: Senators, all-electric cars, Roomba robot-vacs, and even the iPad. I doubt even Thomas Eddison could have foreseen these.
And what do you think we'll have in 50 years? According to scientists who have looked at the technological advances from 1960 to 2010, they estimated that every generation of our advances will increase 10-15%! So those of you under 80, there's still chances of seeing those hover cars you were promised so long ago. I'll personally be faithfully searching amazon for flying skateboards and self-tying shoelaces when 2020 rolls around (Thanks to Michael J. Fox).
You're probably wondering what I'm getting at with all this tech mumbo-jumbo on this website the entire time, but when you think about it, digital cameras are an amazing piece of tech gold. I remember the Nikon D1 back in '99 with the 2.8 megapixel sensor that cost like 5000$; fast forward to today with the 200 Million Pixel Hasselblad (seriously, what would you get, 12 shots on a 64gb card?) and the subject of this post, tiny 1cm cameras with better quality and pixel count than a DSLR just 10 years ago.
Almost, if not every cell phone today, smart or not, has a camera in it; but that camera is usually overlooked with the untrue bias that a 1cm dot in my PHONE can't take just as good pictures as their point and shoot.
But I'm here today to show you that the little 5 or 8mp camera in your phone, paired with arguably the best camera app there is: Camera Plus Pro, IS, in fact, a great secondary pocket cam to your DSLR.
And I'm going to show my evidence with these pictures I grabbed with my iPhone.
As you can probably imagine, I was greatly disappointed the day I went to Gatorland for the first time, and upon arrival, realized that I had forgotten my camera for the first and only time in my life.
Oh how I felt as I spent the first half of the day seeing all these great one-of-a-kind opportunities for a photograph whiz by me, never to be had again. People zipping by on zip lines, gators literally jumping (with their tail) out of the water to get a whole chicken dangling above their faces.
The day was nearly half over now, as we head over to the water play area for my 9-year-old brother and sister.
There I was sitting on the bench imagining I had my camera there on my lap, right when I got a text from my friend. I pulled the phone out of my back pocket, unlocked it, and instead of tapping the Messages app, clumsy little me (the one who ends up accidentally typing Gavenook instead of Facebook on the iPhone browser) accidentally ended up tapping the camera app I always had there on my dock but only used a few times and never seriously.
Right then and there I realized that I had a legitimate 5mp pocket cam right there all day long. It was time to see what this baby could do.
I was surprised. The quality of the camera was phenomenal for its size! Have a look for yourself, and keep in mind, there was no post-processing used on these snaps; These are all the 100% original quality shots:
Beautiful eh? I know! This is the result of that mysterious dot on the back of your phone, and it looks pretty good to me.
What I'm trying to say is you should really try using your camera phone for it's purpose more often. And don't forget, a staple to iPhonetography is Camera Plus Pro.