At first glance, you may see that title and wonder if I have some kind of mental deficit. Over a billion pictures are taken on smartphones every day. The usefulness of the smartphone camera is undeniable. What I am asking for is for people to start using their smartphones the same way that they would use their “good” or “real” cameras.

This is a step ahead for a creator. We have already established that computational photography is both a fact and readily accepted. It delivers on the basic requirements of most people. To take that forward, we need to consider a few facts and then choose to act on them.

I can recall working part time in a camera store about eight years ago, back when this chain actually put photos by its employees up on the walls. There were a number of photos in the store where I helped shoppers, all about 3 feet by 4 feet. They looked terrific at the viewing distances for shoppers who could get as close as about 8 feet to them. Many shoppers would say that when they were looking for a camera, they wanted a camera that could take pictures “like that” while pointing to one of the photographs.

I understand that for a lot of people and even a lot of serious photographers, that a large photographic print is no longer part of their vocabulary. However, the behind the scenes story of these photographs is important.

They were all made by good people, shooting with intent on cameras that had on average 6 megapixel sensors. Of all the viewers, no one cared about the megapixel count, or the dynamic range capability or the number of focus points. Like those who appreciate paintings, they were more interested in the outcome than the tools used to get there.

There are lots of folks who believe that smartphone pictures are good enough for their needs. This makes perfect sense. Back in the days of film, picture taking was commonplace as a memory maker, with 126 cameras, 110 cameras and even the truly awful Disc camera outselling interchangeable lens cameras by huge numbers.

When pocket digital cameras came around, they sold really well. We called them point and shoots, just like the 110 film cameras of old and the smartphone cameras of today. Anyone looking at the outputs will consistently say that the smartphone picture looks better..

Taking smartphone picture taking to photograph making is not such a big step. Some members of the community on KelbyOne that I help moderate and many members of the local camera club are doing this today.

How? Most of the smartphone cameras out in the market today can store more than just JPEG images. Some can even shoot in the RAW format. And just like RAW in a brand new mirrorless, RAW on a smartphone is not truly raw, it is preprocessed based on manufacturer designs that neither you nor I have any control over. In this view, you could correctly say that all modern cameras do some form of computational photography.

Once you have these smartphone images in a RAW format, made with relatively high megapixel sensors, you have files that are readily enhance-able in common editing programs. Both Capture One and Lightroom can read smartphone RAW files natively, and I can use the same tools as I do for my larger format camera files. No matter how good a job the computational photography algorithm in my smartphone works, there is always something that I see that could benefit from a bit of work on my part.

The gap that takes the mental effort to bridge is to think of the smartphone as more than just a point and shoot. My now outdated iPhone 12 Max is two models old, but still does a decent job. When I set to capture in RAW instead of JPEG or its native HEIC format, I get image files that give me lots of room to work with. In the last six months I have seen excellent images submitted for sharing and discussion by camera club members who are not embarrassed to say that they were made on a smartphone, with the same intent and story as they would use for their larger sensored cameras.

It’s a mental step, not a gear step. Folks tend to upgrade their smartphones more frequently than their dedicated cameras. Nothing is preventing you from going from taking pictures with your smartphone to making photographs with it.