A Brief History of Cell Phone Photography (a common man’s perspective)

The onslaught of modern cellular phone technology has brought with it a new breed of hobbyist photographers armed with nothing more than camera phones. Ever since the first camera phones came out, we've been seeing blogs and even entire web communities popping up on the internet built around photos taken using mobile phones.

First generation camera phones produced pictures that were of very low resolution by today's standards (320 pixels x 240 pixels, or even smaller), but they had one characteristic that made them perfect for the old internet's limited bandwidth: small file sizes. Back then if a person had a 128-Kbps internet connection at home his friends would move in with him.

As the internet evolved, so did camera phone technology, and megapixel cameras on mobile phones were fast becoming commonplace. This meant that it was now possible to take better-quality, higher-resolution pictures. Camera phones now provided an alternative to dedicated digital cameras. Although they were far from posing a threat to true digital cameras, people were choosing them for the simple fact that camera phones were very portable, being integrated into cell phones.

As more and more people started to publish an increasing variety of photos online, it became apparent that some form of control would need to be implemented soon, because some, no, make that a lot of photos were being posted that were clearly not what the cell phone designers had in mind when they first created the camera phones.

Phone manufactures came up with different methods to deter the improper use of the gadgets, and perverts kept coming up with ways to defeat them. The cycle continues to this day.

Fortunately, as camera phones went up in class, so did the users. They began to see their phones as true digital cameras, using them for more than snapshots. There are even many extraordinary cell phone photographers in existence today.

Today, the highest resolution for a camera phone is 5 megapixels, the same as the average digital camera. With a creative eye, and perhaps a little Photoshop skill, the average camera phone – wielding Joe can bring out the artist in him.