Mobile photography getting less cheesy

Earlier this summer, I attended a small wedding ceremony. The happy couple had hired a professional photographer who, along with his assistant, darted in and out of view as they captured the blissful event. It was slightly distracting, what with a flash going off and the occasional obstructed view, but not nearly as distracting as every other person in attendance whipping out their cell phone and snapping a few photos of their own. This wackiness isn’t just limited to weddings, either. It seems that no matter where you go, someone, somewhere, is snapping off a photo with their phone. What is this craze, nay, compulsion that is driving us to become a shutter-bug society?

I’ve talked a lot about mobile phones over the past year – the operating systems, the apps and the explosive growth of usage. Phone-based cameras are just another piece of our mobile evolution. Mobile phone-based cameras aren’t anything new – mobile phone-based cameras that produce a quality image are. And that is what is happening.

The cameras that are being built into phones just continue to get better and better. Just take a look at the most popular cameras used on social networks and in online photo communities. Flickr.com shows Apple’s 5-megapixel iPhone 4 taking a near vertical climb to the top as the most used camera – a spot that has been dominated by Nikon and Canon’s line of professional/prosumer cameras since we began tracking such stats. And the future only continues to look brighter for phone-based cameras as their resolutions continue to increase.

Apple’s newly announced, iPhone 4S, boasts an 8-megapixel camera with “improved” optics, which in the world of digital imagery is more of leap than a bound … or is it the other way around? Or are they both the same thing. Either way, it’s huge bound/leap to jump 3-megapixels in about a year.

But Apple isn’t the only one beefing up the quality of the camera on its phone. Samsung released the Galaxy SII earlier this summer with an 8.2-megapixel camera and Motorola has also released its 8-megapixel Photon. In addition to having such remarkable resolution in what is essentially a pocket camera, all three of these phones also offer the ability to record high-definition video and provide built-in image editing tools, not to mention the plethora of image editing apps available, and of course, with a phone-based camera, you have the ability to upload and share your photos almost instantaneously.

So what are all the oohs and aahs about? If everything seems to be getting smaller, and the smaller they get, the better they get; why is a larger megapixel camera better? And what the heck is a megapixel anyway?

A megapixel is simply the metric name for 1-million pixels. To fully understand megapixels though, you really need to get your mind around what a pixel is.

A pixel is a teeny-tiny square on a digital image that when combined with other pixels, renders a complete image. It is basically the smallest portion of an image that can be displayed and controlled/edited. The size of a pixel can vary depending on its use and how the photo is ultimately going to be displayed. Pixel sizes aren’t typically measured individually, but rather in groupings such as “pixels per inch” (ppi). That measurement is commonly referred to as the resolution of the image. An industry standard for printing physical reproductions of photos is around 300ppi, although a decent looking photo can be produced at 200ppi.

When the term megapixel is used, it is referring to the total number of pixels in the entire image. A typical 8 megapixel camera produces an image that measures 3266 X 2450 pixels. The more megapixels in an image, the larger the physical size of the image becomes. Here is an example of how that applies: when I was working as a photojournalist, I used the Nikon D1, which produced a 2.6-megapixel image. The largest photo that I could print, without loss of definition, was a 7 X 5 inch photo – about the size you get when you send out for prints at the photo counter at the grocery store. That is a perfectly sized image for most anyone’s use. The problem lies in trying to enlarge the image or cropping in on something that might be in the background – you just can’t do it without losing significant quality of the photo.

My new camera is the Nikon D7000, which produces a 16.2-megapixel image. The largest photo that I can print from this camera, without loss of definition, is a whopping 16 X 11 inch photo – almost double the size of what I was previously able to produce. Now if I were to take identical pictures using both cameras and print them to 7 X 5 inch size, I probably wouldn’t notice much of a difference in the clarity and sharpness between the two images. But with the larger megapixel image, I can now enlarge the image or crop it tighter with confidence, knowing that the resulting image will not show any loss in quality.

If you’ve upgraded your phone recently, especially to one of the newer smart-phones, you’ve no doubt noticed a marked improvement of the quality of the photos you are now able to take. We’ve noticed it at work – many of my co-workers have been producing absolutely stunning photographs and then sharing them on the various social networks. We’ve been so impressed by them, that we even held a contest recently. We asked each employee to submit one picture taken with their phone that they were especially proud of, and then we posted all the photos in an album on our Facebook wall and asked the public to “like” their favorite. The results of the voting were very impressive, and the litany of comments only validates the quality of the photos taken.

As a photographer, I’m anxiously waiting to see what the future brings in regards to phone-based cameras. The hot 8-megapixels that have been released this year will most likely seem primitive to us within the next three.

Michael D. Wailes is an Interactive Developer at Burns Marketing and Communications in Johnstown. If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic for a future Geek Chic column, email him at news@ncbr.com.

on Facebook on LinkedIn