Our lives are full of images, and the photography industry has seen first hand how phone cameras are changing the way we view photography.
“We have so many photos that we end up just hoarding them and sticking them on a hard drive and never looking at them again,” Alexi High said, while scrolling through his most recent photos on his iPhone.
On average, more than 95 million photos and videos are uploaded to Instagram a day, according to an August 2018 report by Instagram. There are more than 200 million iPhone users in the United States, and that accounts for just 45 percent of all smartphones, according to a report by Apple in July 2019.
“It’s been interesting to watch as cameras get better," Samantha Johnston, executive director of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, said. “People are still wanting to use the dark room, people still want to use film.”
Johnston said around five or six years ago the center started an iPhone photography class.
“It’s really amazing to kind of see the breadth of the work that can be created with all the filters and all the access you have on the phone as well,” she said.
Some professional photographers now use iPhones themselves as a tool, not as a replacement, to more traditional cameras.
“I do have an iPhone and I do use it,” Marti Neveln, a professional photographer, said. Her work is on display for sale in her neighborhood art gallery. She has been doing photography for about 10 years.
“For the photographer whose trying to sell work it’s become more difficult,” she said. But she still feels that ever-improving cameras on phones are a positive change.
“Just in general, individually we are consuming imagery at a much higher rate than we ever were before,” Johnston said.
“I think we’re also losing that tendency to want really quality photos,” High said. “I think that good photographers, there’s a place for them just as in any other time period.”
