The All-American Photo Souvenir

We all do it.   "Hey, honey, let's stand in front of Cinderella's Castle and have these nice strangers take our picture.  Here's my phone, sir, push right here to take the shot!"

When I talk to people, it seems like almost everyone have really positive things to say about the cameras on their phone.    My iPad takes pretty good pictures, though slightly less good as compared to the iPhone 4GS.   Certainly, the upcoming iPhone 5 will have an epic camera upgrade.

(My Galaxy Nexus is a fantastic productivity device and phone.   A miserable camera.  My old iPhone was a great web surfer, bad phone and pretty decent video camera)

The move towards camera phones for capturing family moments, sort of makes me sad.   So many apps out there are geared to turning your phone camera into a real photography tool.   So many real artists are using it for just that and coming up with some great results.   Some of the [photography - meets - social] leaders seem to embrace and promote this idea of using the camera phone as an artistic tool.  Many sell apps to this point.

I suppose I'm a little more bullish on the idea.   While, i respect the works of those photographers who have turned their phones into real photography tools, I can't help to think how many of us have 1,000's of crappy throw away, low resolution, high noise and poorly metered shots from our camera phones.

There is a good side to all these camera-phone-instagram junkies filling the inter-tubes with their collective camera rolls.   The populace is getting acclimated to noisy, semi-blurry pictures from crappy camera phones. If someone comes along with a decent shot from decent little camera with good optics and a fair sensor - people will go batty thinking it's a masterpiece! :)   I for one, will not be trusting my cameraphone anytime soon for capturing irreplaceable memories of my little ones.  

The Nikon J1 performed admirably on this trip..