THERE ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF THINGS TO PHOTOGRAPH. ONE ONLY NEEDS TO USE THEIR IMAGINATION.

Sometimes you cannot get close enough to get right picture, or enlarge an image sufficiently to get the result you want with a cellphone camera. Cellphone camera lenses are generally short focal length, wide angle lenses. This is because wide angle lenses have almost everything in focus, from near to far. They are the opposite of long focal length, telephoto lenses, where nothing close, and very little at distance is in focus. This is a principle of optics. Lighting is another issue with cell phone pictures. Many cell phone pictures I see of people’s faces are often shadowy and dark . Try using your cellphone’s fill flash option or a reflector (a piece of white paper will do) to reduce the shadows. Please don’t get me wrong, cellphones are capable of good photos. Many of the photos in other parts of this website were taken with my cellphone. Each has its place in the world of photography.

There is an old saying in photography: If you don’t like the way your pictures look, you probably are not close enough.

Before the digital revolution, film speeds were limited to about (ASA) 1600, because film emulsion above 1600 caused photographs to be grainy, especially when enlarged. This was especially true of color film. Some photographers went to larger format cameras to get around this. I purchased a 6 x 6 cm (2 1/4″ x 2 1/4″) camera back in the 1970’s, but found it was heavy, bulky, and expensive. I couldn’t afford lenses for it, and developing was more expensive. When the world went digital, around the turn of the last century, film cameras became instant dinosaurs. Many camera dealers were caught with thousands of film cameras in their inventories they couldn’t sell. Today, camera stores are almost all gone. Digital cameras are available everywhere, some touting ISO’s (like film’s ASA) speeds over 100,000. Noise in digital cameras is similar to what we used to call grain with film. Today we can easily take pictures of stars in the night sky, and the Milky Way. Digital cameras allow us to see our photographs immediately, check exposure with a built in histogram, change composition, and shoot as many pictures as we want, for almost nothing. Digital has revolutionized photography forever, and, for the better.