Stop taking keepsake photos with your smartphone

I'm imploring you to stop using your smartphone to take any photos that are intended to preserve personal memories.

Buy a real camera™ instead.

Phone cameras are going to ruin a whole generation's family photos—

Focal Length

All smartphones ship with a <30mm default focal length.

This causes subjects to be diminished while surroundings take precedent and significant distortion occurs at the edges of the image.

Our intention is to capture intimate family moments, not film a fish-eyed skate video.

This is, of course, indicative of our current social-media culture— setting is more important than subject.

It's also a common amateur photographer mistake to want to capture everything in a scene, and assume there is no difference between physically zooming-in and "just cropping afterwards".

A significant part of what makes for a beautiful image is framing and omission.

Of course phone cameras have optical zoom now, but the problem is you cannot change the default zoom level.

Most boomers use whatever is set when they open the camera app, which is typically very wide angle (~24mm on the newest iPhones).

Prior to digital, most off-the-shelf film cameras were sold with a 50mm lens or greater, and the 35mm film format produced a shallower depth of field. This is why family photos from the 80s and 90s look so tasteful despite our parents being amateur photographers- framing was tight and intimate.

Artificial Intelligence

Smartphones don't take real photos, in the sense that there is no longer a deterministic link between the light the sensor saw and the pixels stored in memory.

Smartphone photography is becoming indistinguishable from AI slop, because it literally is AI slop. Manufacturers use inexpensive image sensors and use software to make up for the lack of quality. Google Pixel and Samsung are the worst offenders, but iPhones also heavily process images.

And if all of this isn't enough, there is evidence that mofieid photos, especially ubiquitous AI modified photos, change our memories

Synthetic Human Memories: AI-Edited Images and Videos Can Implant False Memories and Distort Recollection