We're All in a Somnambulistic Haze Now (iPhone 11 Pro with Craig Mod) →

It’s super fun to see someone who actually knows something about photography talk about iPhone 11 Pro and taking pictures. Craig Mod in a past issue of the consistently excellent Roden newsletter:

Unless you’ve been in a somnambulistic haze the past decade, none of this is out of the blue. Nearly six years ago (!) I (over-) wrote an essay called Software is the Future of Photography. At that time it was somewhat heretical to imagine non-camera-shaped-objects replacing “true” cameras. Namely: smartphones. People got Internet Upset at you for suggesting this. Especially when you suggested it in The New Yorker and were, like, pissing yourself with nerves because: the goddamned New Yorker. Anyway — six years later, software innovation in photography is chugging along at full speed and the smartphone has become the number one image production tool for most of the world.

The implications of this are protean, shifting year-by-year — from allowing average folks to capture the banalities of their beach vacation, to getting better front-line data and reports from protestors and war-zones around the world. The social and political implications of better, easier photography in the hands of more people, all of the time, can’t be overestimated. Furthermore, it’s inevitable that the algorithms will point backwards out of the phones and into the single-purpose cameras themselves. Leica is restructuring the company, in part, around computational photography. And which dork among us wouldn’t be excited to see Deep Fusion level enhancements work in real-time seamlessly integrated into an M12, or M13? Fat, fast glass, big sensors, smart chips. Yes, please.

The evolution of this story is one of the most intriguing to follow in technology.

As an aside, this line is funny in retrospect:

I had been inside for 24 hours, was antsy.

He wrote this in October 2019 (soon after iPhone 11 Pro shipped). As I write in April 2020, 24 hours inside is nothing.