ROBIN WONG : Camera Died? No Problem, Continue Shooting With Phone

Last weekend, I was out and about with some friends, on my last street photography outing before I take a long break for the Chinese New Year holidays. I am flying home to Kuching, Borneo for about two weeks, and I won't be doing much photography there, it will be prioritized for family and friends, especially for dear mum. In this final outing, I brought out a cheap old compact camera I got from the local buy-sell marketplace, and there is always that risk of the camera dying, and it just did! The camera can turn on and all, but every image it took was over-exposed. It could be due to faulty shutter mechanism, or aperture blades being stuck, I had no idea what happened, but the bottom-line was - the camera was no use. I put the camera back in its bag and whipped out my smartphone instead. And I continued snapping away.

I did recently just purchase a new smartphone, to replace my old dying one. The new phone was Poco X6 Pro, a mid-range, super budget friendly unit that does have some impressive processing power and internals, high resolution, high refresh rate screen, fast charging, but the compromise was the camera - every review out there bashed the mediocre to underwhelming performance of the camera. To me, that was fine, I was buying a smartphone, not a camera, and I have cameras (note, plural). I did not intend to do a review on the smartphone camera, there was no point to do so, there are so many reviews published out there already, and it still suffered the same issues as any other modern smartphone cameras - AF lag, shutter lag, overprocessed colors, over sharpened images with too aggressive noise reduction that smears all the fine details and contrast, fake HDR processing that made the image looks more like a painting than a natural picture. I have honestly given up on smartphone camera for photography, that's why we have real cameras - they take real pictures without all the intrusive AI computational photography that made things a lot worse than they did improve the imaging output.

But the camera I brought out died, and the only other imaging tool I had was the smartphone camera.

Instead of complaining about all the inadequacies of modern smartphone camera, I brushed that all aside, unlocked the phone, turned on the camera app, and started snapping away.

Were the images looking really bad if I pixel-peep? Yes. They were all as bad as I have described. Did I have a great time walking along the streets of Kuala Lumpur with a group of fun-loving friends on a glorious Sunday morning with beautiful light? I sure did. Sometimes photography is a lot more than just the tool we use, and the best camera is the one that you have with you, and in this case, the one that still works. So, I snapped away some shots and it was, indeed, an enjoyable walk, a much-needed shutter therapy to cap things off, before I embark on my coming holiday.

The lesson here - complain less, shoot more. Reminder to self too.