Computational photography is great, actually
It isn't the iPhone 3GS aesthetic you are missing
Ever since last year’s Samsung moon photo fiasco, when it turned out that the Galaxy S23 ultra had an algorithm to change anything resembling the moon into a more detailed photo, a quiet revolt has been brewing against algorithm-assisted photography. The argument goes that these software improvements go too far. With the moon, they definitely did.
I decided to spend a week taking photos without these improvements. All of the photos in the articles were taken with Zerocam, which proclaims to be the ‘zero AI photography’ app, but I may as well have used Halide’s and its Process Zero, the idea is the same: take raw sensor data and don’t let Apple’s algorithms do anything with the pictures. They are entirely unedited.
I can’t exactly remember which iPhone model the process started with, but a New Yorker article from 2022 argues that these photos might be ‘too good’, but ‘Smart HDR’ goes as far back as at least the iPhone X🅂, so it’s around the iPhone 11-iPhone 12 days that the company really ramped up the development of these algorithms.
What they do is simple but a little mysterious, as is anything computational or AI these days. It definitely tones down highlights, especially clouds, to maintain their aesthetic, brightens faces and some dark areas, as well as doing some colour smoothing. The result is that you get a fairly standard image that is almost never under or over-exposed, and if you want, you can get a style applied to it.
There are the obvious other options, such as taking a Live Photo, which is amazing when you look back at the same image a few years later and capture a sound-bite or a tiny bit of motion that makes the scene look a bit more alive, and doesn’t sacrifice any image quality. Portrait mode is also fun for the first ten photos you take with it, but it looks fake compared to anyone who has ever seen real bokeh. The iPhone processes photos after you take them, finding subjects and important parts that you might want to keep exposed.
With Zerocam, you lose these. Instead, you get a very simplistic interface, where all you can change is zooming in 2x, meaning you lose the ultra-wide lens too, and a funky shutter button with haptic feedback. You lose the flash, you lose video, and you lose access to the front camera as well. But hey, it’s at least fairly quick.
The shutter button’s text changes with each shot. That’s fun! And the change in camera interface definitely made me take more photos, almost like having a new camera or lens.
I like the look of some of the photos. Without the forced (or, erm, Smart) HDR, the contrast is a lot punchier and it makes for very satisfying shots when there isn’t too much dynamic range going on. It doesn’t change colours or lighting, though.
But Zerocam takes you back to the halcyon days of 2007-2008 phone photography, so you also lose tap-to-focus, exposure lock or exposure controls, it’s incredibly minimal, and I did find myself hopefully tapping away at my subject in hopes that it would focus - without much success.
There’s a certain raw-ness to these photos in the colloquial sense, so I see the appeal. We fundamentally want to stand out with our photos, especially as many are taken to be posted on social media, so being unique is important. I think this is the larger reason behind why point-and-shoots from the early 2000s are having a bit of a moment: Gen Z have figured out that film photography is fun, but it takes time and money to get the photos back, so it’s easier to get an old Nikon. Polaroids came back a few years ago and so have disposable film cameras.
I have a friend who’s massively into very retro 35mm cameras. But those have a more mechanical, tactile feel to them. The same applies for Super 8 video cameras: holding your finger on a screen is nowhere near the same as holding down a trigger and hearing the reel of film wound through the camera. That feeling is cool enough for Kodak to charge $5500 for it.
This is not a new phenomenon. In the photography world, the Canon-Nikon-Sony-Fuji divide of modern photography boils down to how the cameras feel, handle and work, but they are very close in performance to each other. A lot of photographers swear by DSLRs rather than mirrorless cameras for their ‘aesthetic’ even if they are heavy and perform worse in low light. Leica, ostensibly a Panasonic camera for people with too much money to spend, has some colour science behind it, which can be emulated with editing. Phase One and Hasselblad also exist, but I can’t tell you why they are unique other than sensor size, engineering and camera science.
But learning how to edit photos takes time and practice. So does composition, exposure control, and all the other basic tenets of photography. Instead, we seek shortcuts to stand out, and with iOS 18 allowing the lock screen shortcuts to be changed, I won’t be surprised if some people make the definite switch to Halide or another camera app.
This is great, especially if it spurs people to think more about how they take photos. It’s ultimately an art form, so the more you practice it, the better you will become. Computational algorithms provide a great baseline, though, and the basic camera app at least ensures that you don’t lose any details or important moments. If you have a supported model, starting to shoot in ProRAW could be a great first step to producing more unique images.
But phone cameras can only get marginal gains as their size limits what sensor you can put inside them, which is why photos from a normal camera are significantly more detailed. I can’t blame tech companies for pushing for software improvements: the flop of the Samsung Galaxy Camera, an interchangeable-lens Android camera/phone scared everyone away from trying to turn the phone more camera-like. Cameras could be turned more phone-like - I don’t understand why, a decade after the iPhone 5s, we still don’t have fingerprint readers in shutter buttons to deter camera theft, but that’s a topic for a different article.
I won’t stay with Zerocam, but this was a fun experiment.
A few thoughts on iOS 18
iOS 18 is out today and I’ve been testing it for the past few months. Some of the things you may want to try are switching app icon colours on the Home Screen - I’ve made mine monochrome and I like the aesthetic. I’ve also changed the left side Lock Screen shortcut to have Notion there instead. Control centre can now be reconfigured, so have a play around with it. This is what mine looks like. It’s pretty stable overall. Remember, after updating, phones re-run certain processes in the background, so poorer battery life is normal in the first few days.
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