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Jakarta Post

Mobile phone photography: Boundaries and breakthroughs

Enabling communication to the point where it is almost without boundaries, mobile phones with their manifold ways for creating and sharing visual content allow users to engage in nuanced communication with others.

Muthi Kautsar (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Thu, October 22, 2020 Published on Oct. 22, 2020 Published on 2020-10-22T06:58:38+07:00

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W

hen getting a new mobile phone, a good built-in camera is a key consideration for many people, aside from other factors including the operating system, design, performance, storage and battery life.

Well aware of this, mobile phone makers are competing to create the most sophisticated built-in camera possible, giving consumers many options for devices to take good photos and videos.

Enabling communication to the point where it is almost without boundaries, mobile phones with their manifold ways for creating and sharing visual content allow users to engage in nuanced communication with others.

Improved communication aside, mobile phone photography has “turned everyone into a photographer”, as cited by online forum 1000kata.com in the review of the photo book “LITE”, which presents images captured by photographer Yuniadhi Agung using a mobile phone.

Agung told The Jakarta Post by text message that he had published his photos in the book because he had so many of them on his mobile phone’s storage, and it would be a pity if he didn’t do anything with the photos.

He titled the book “LITE”, which could mean light in weight, referring to the way the images were captured or the way he felt when capturing them: lighthearted.

“I wasn’t thinking [much]; what I saw, I photographed,” said Agung.

Photos created with mobile phones, of course, may not exceed those created using full-fledged cameras by the professionals. However, there have been many breakthroughs in the technical prowess of mobile phone cameras.

Renowned photo journalist Beawiharta told the Post in a telephone interview that many features of mobile phone cameras had not been thought of in the past.

The burst mode, which enables people to obtain several frames at just one press of the camera shutter, is one thing Bea never imagined a mobile phone camera would be capable of.

“Actually, the superiority of a mobile phone camera is that it is built within a communication device,” said Bea, adding that people would then only need one single device to communicate and take photos.

Furthermore, when the mobile phone user wants to share a photo he or she took using the phone, an additional device for that purpose is not necessary. And that is something a ‘normal’ camera cannot do.

Night mode: A climbing wall is seen in a photo taken using the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE. A value flagship recently launched by Samsung, the Galaxy S20 FE employs advanced technology that enables automatic set-up for capturing clear, bright images even in low light condition. (JP/Muthi Kautsar)

Bea also praised mobile phone cameras’ ability to employ a professional mode, which enables people to manually set up the camera, for instance to capture good photos in low light conditions. But, as far as he knows, using mobile phone cameras is still difficult for such purposes as sport photography, where those being photographed are moving fast.

Often when using the mobile phone camera to capture images for his Instagram Stories, Bea pointed out what’s often forgotten about mobile phone photography: “Although we have a good mobile phone with a good built-in camera, to produce good photos, people still have to understand the basics of photography.”

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