Apple's iPhone Challenge proves the photographer is still more important than AI

Apple has selected the ten winning photos of its Shot on iPhone Challenge. The pictures, which will be featured on billboards over selected cities around the globe, are meant to highlight the iPhone’s photographic capabilities.  The winners of the Shot on iPhone Challenge came from different countries, including Germany, Singapore, Belarus, Israel and the US. The panel of judges included some Apple SVPs and VPs (Phil Schiller, Jon McCormack, Kaiann Drance), along with big international photography names, such as former Chief Official White House Photographer Pete Souza, and Luisa Dörr, a young Brazilian photographer who shot 12 cover portraits for TIME on her iPhone.

The winning pictures span across different themes and techniques, going from the typical “street photography” shots to wide naturalistic scenes with an impressive dynamic range, to clever semi-abstract photos with surprising and colorful patterns. It’s noteworthy that the pics aren’t all shot on the latest Apple hardware––one of them comes from an iPhone 8 Plus, two are from an iPhone 7. Also worth mentioning: there are no bokeh-heavy portraits among the selected pictures this time around. Even if they were picked for how they leveraged the iPhone’s camera strengths, the winning photos don’t seem to single out a specific software feature, but rather focus on the abilities of the photographer who took the shot.

Even in the current age of computational photography you need to know how to properly frame a subject, understand composition. The picture is always in your head, before it’s in the camera. An AI-enhanced smartphone camera can certainly help you take a better night picture, or a more balanced and well-exposed photo, but it still won’t be able to make you a better photographer overall.

That’s why I think Apple got the iPhone camera’s AI enhancements just right: they stay subtle and simple, and never get in the way of the actual shot. Don’t get me wrong: Google Pixel’s night mode is an astounding software feat; Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro has the most impressive phone camera optics ever featured on a phone. The right photographer can certainly do a lot with them, especially after fiddling with the hundreds of fine tunings and settings hidden throughout the interface of the camera app. 
Still, somehow, it’s the iPhone’s software that just gets it. For me, that’s a testament to how the humans behind that code are trying to write software that aims at Photography, rather than the at the mere act of taking a beautiful picture.