A while ago I received an email from an angry guy saying he didn’t like any of my works because he could take better photos with his mobile phone. I was curious which of my photos he was talking about, and in angrier tone, he basically said: all of them. All of the photos I took were rubbish compared to all the photos he took with his mobile phone.

Although he never showed me a single photo he ever shot, this got me questioning my entire career in photography. Several sleepless seconds went by and I started to think whether I should sell all my photography equipment so I can buy his mobile phone. After much extensive research based on… common sense, I figured out that there were only two reasons why that angry guy did what he did. 1. He finds intimidation amusing. or 2. He’s someone with an agenda.

What kind of agenda? I don’t know. Something involving money, usually. However, I was so carried away with my train of thoughts, wondering, if that guy actually time-hopped from 2025 and actually possesed a mobile phone that could take much better pictures than today's professional dSLR, would I trade all my money for that phone?

Two hundred years ago, a camera was a huge wooden box with a drop of chemical inside, whose function was to turn a white paper into a grey paper. Photographic community discussion back then bloomed around stark black-and-white landscape and portraits of unsmiling people.

Today's engineering magnificence allows a camera to be strapped onto a grasshopper, take picture of your crush’s lunch from 50 km away, or clap its shutter faster than our dendrites firing impulses. Photographic community nowadays pulls each other’s hair debating over virtual reality, photo manipulation, downloadable softwares, wireless capability, and pixel interpolation.

In the next 50 years, MIT scientists foresee that microchips containing image sensors and terabytes of data storage will be implanted inside everyone’s eyes. With a verbal ‘click', a photo is captured. Should we wish to display the photo, just wink and tiny laser projectors will beam holographic images directly onto our retina. That is when Mrs. Rowling's dream of cross-dimensional photography would come in reality.

But long before the brightest minds of our world manage to get the equation in Hogward, I believe, in about 10 years from now, the romantic relationship between camera manufacturers and mobil phone manufacturers will flourish to a point where a camera phone can achieve the exact quality as today’s dSLR. An extension of today’s facial detection feature will be introduced. They’ll call it lighting detection, maybe, or mood detection.

All you need to do is upload a certain photo, preferably a photo taken by a professional, to your camera. Point the camera to the scene you desire to capture, then a system will do an automatic computation to your camera’s settings. Mini drones functioning as lighting support will be instructed to take off from the back of the camera and position themselves in a certain coordinates. When a big “All Set” is flashing on your view finder, simply push the shutter button and a photo that mimic the lighting and mood of the image you previously uploaded is created. Professional quality in point-and-shoot, integrated decently into everyone's mobile phone.

That mobile phone certainly makes me drool, but do I want to trade all my money for that device? In fact, I’d rather pay to join a discussion within the photographic community of 2025. When advanced and sophisticated technology are increasingly becoming easy-to-digest and accessible to everyone, artists would open a new realm of authentic creativity in order to keep their jobs. The unimagined possibilities will be deeper explored to prevent high-schoolers from mimicking their works so easily. A camera will always be a tool no matter how advanced it is. The curious brain controlling it is the main fuel to keep photography evolution rolling.

Enough daydreaming for today. Please enjoy the pre wedding series of Robby and Lia I took in Bali a couple of months ago. I used my good ol’ dSLR and I am loving every bits of it.

Cheers,

Adi.