They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and this was all too true during a recent wedding in Italy. On my first night in the small village of San Paolo Albanese, I was enjoying a late night Peroni with the bride and her maid of honour when we suddenly smelt smoke. All the locals rushed to the Town Hall to get a view of what was going on and it quickly became apparent that the trees just outside the village were on fire. My camera bag was safely locked away in my apartment but I did have my trusty iPhone 4S with me and so I followed the Italians down the road to observe them as they battled the flames. Obviously I made sure I didn’t get too close as I was there to document a wedding, not the fire, but none-the-less the photojournalist in me couldn’t resist taking a shot or two of the Italian fire brigade at work.

I am pretty stunned by the quality of this low light iPhone photograph. Sure it’s grainy, but it was so dark on the road that night I am amazed that the tiny little sensor in the iPhone managed to capture anything at all.

It seems there has been quite a bit of interest in an iPhone image I took yesterday. The shot in question is of Tower Bridge in London. I have had a lot of questions about how I actually achieved the shot so here is how it went…

Peering out the train window I spotted Tower Bridge to my right. I could see a train approaching in the opposite direction so I switched on the camera app, held my iPhone up to the glass to minimise internal reflections and shot through the carriage of the passing train. I then opened the image in Snapseed (a fantastic and fast processing app from Nik Software) spent a few seconds on the black and white conversion, saved and closed. The whole process from conception to processed shot took about 30 seconds.

Had I been using a ‘real camera’ the image would probably have been sharper, I would certainly have had greater control over exposure, depth of field and more details in the shadows and the highlights. But had I been using any other camera I probably wouldn’t have achieved this shot the way I did. And I certainly wouldn’t have been able to process it and upload it to several different social networks in a matter of seconds.

It raises the question, is it the camera or the photographer that makes a great photograph?