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B+W

T

he team that brings

you this wonderful

magazine is a truly

lovely bunch of

people, and their

emails of

admonishment to me (usually

for the late delivery of my

copy) are among the politest

I receive from any of my

clients, but one of the (sadly,

many) things I do that drives

them round the bend is when

I use a picture that I have

already used in one of my

earlier columns. I do keep a

log of images I’ve used but,

if I’m honest, I seldom look at

it...and I’ve used a fair few

images over the time I’ve

been writing!

Well, this month I am using

a picture that has recently

appeared in this column (in

the Autumn issue, number

233) but for two very specific

reasons, so I hope I can get

away with it. Reason number

one is, I hope, to finally put all

the arguments about quality

to bed once and for all. Listen

carefully dear readers: any

type, make or model of

camera in a phone will never

be as good quality as a top of

the range DSLR. However, the

quality produced by a decent

mobile phone can be perfectly

adequate for your needs.

It’s a phone OK – the lenses

are tiny etc – but, for me, the

fact that I have a capture

device on my person at all

times, a capture device that is

capable of producing decent

quality pictures, far outweighs

any arguments about quality.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it

again: mobile photography is

the greatest leap forward in

my photography, my creativity

and my enjoyment of

photography in my lifetime.

S

hown here is a picture

that I had printed

especially to prove a

point for this column. It

is one of the pictures I shot in

Kyiv recently, and it has been

printed on to canvas one

metre square. It was shot on

my Huawei P20 Pro on an

overcast day. I ask you, how

much quality do you actually

need? Obviously you want

your pictures to look good,

but remember – a good

photographer can produce

a great picture, whatever kind

of camera they use.

The second reason for

showing this work is to

encourage you all to print your

pictures. Don’t leave them

sitting in your smartphone or

on your laptop, doing nothing.

There really is no excuse!

A smartphone can’t compete with a top quality camera but it can

produce an image that will print beautifully at one metre square,

say Tim Clinch – and to prove his point, he’s done just that.

TECHNIQUE SMART GUIDE TO PHOTOGRAPHY

All images

© Tim Clinch

THE PICTURES THIS MONTH

The pictures shown here are all examples of the quality you can get

from smartphone pictures when printed. The image above shows me

holding the one metre square print on canvas of a building in Kyiv. The

rest are from a commission I had to fill the walls of a holiday home in

Andalucia. All the pictures were shot on an iPhone 8 Plus and are good

enough quality to have printed to this size. Should you be wondering,

the pictures in the frames were straightened perfectly in the end!