The "Aha!" Moment

In which a DSLR snob discovers there might be something to iphone photography after all.

- Barry Tanenbaum

ABOUT FIVE YEARS AGO, travel photographer Jack Hollingsworth was on a resort shoot in the Caribbean. There’d be stills and video, lots of locations, and the client keeping an eye on everything. Nine cases of gear loaded on the plane.

Only eight came off. In the missing case were Hollingsworth’s cameras and lenses. He knew the case would show up, but he was on a tight schedule so he went to work with the backup Canon 5D Mark II and the 50mm lens he’d carried on the plane.

Quickly exhausting the possibilities of a 50mm lens, he nevertheless assured the client that everything was under control and took a break to let the beauty of the landscape calm him down. Then he took a photo, just to relax. Then he took out his iPhone—with which he’d taken very few photographs, none he thought were good—and shot the same scene. “The iPhone photo was not bad,” he says. So he took a few more comparison sets. “The iPhone shots looked better, probably because I was looking at them on a nice bright screen. But the thought stayed with me that this could actually be a significant camera for me to use.”

It was a bit low key, but there it was: the “Aha!” moment.

The ninth case showed up, the resort shoot was shot, and Jack Hollingsworth came home a changed photographer.

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