PigPog

Your phone is a camera, but not an especially good one. Even if you have a fancy phone, it's still not really very good. But it can use computational photography to make up for some of its shortcomings. And that can be quite effective. Plus, for many of the photos we take, we don't actually need a good camera. So it can be fine. I use mine a lot.

Portrait Mode

A lot of phone cameras now have a portrait mode, where they use depth information to blur out the background. Occasionally it can work well, but it struggles with fine details. And most portraits do tend to have hair in them, around the edges of the subject, just where it's a problem, making portrait mode suitable for many things, but not great for portraits.

Best Uses

• If the camera in your phone is what you have, try it for anything you want to do - they may not be good, but they can be fine for many things. The old saying is "The best camera is the one you have with you", and cameras in phones totally win at that.
• Street Photography can be done pretty well on a phone camera. You don't usually want a shallow Depth of Field for it anyway, and it's most often done in daylight, so it plays pretty well to these camera's strengths.
  • The biggest problem is probably the ergonomics. No tactile controls, no grips, just a flat rectangle with a screen to poke at.
    • Can be improved a bit with accessory grips. I have a MagSafe ring from Belkin (the one for Continuity Camera, clips the phone to your MacBook screen) and that can help quite a bit. Using the volume buttons as shutter buttons helps too, and the iPhone 15 Pro's Action Button is a nice addition to launch the camera app and then become the shutter.
  • The second biggest problem is likely to be shutter lag - makes it hard to get just the right moment. Features like Burst Mode and Live Photos can really help, though, making up for that lost precision by taking a lot of photos at once, so you can pick later.
  • You don't look like a photographer, and everyone else has camera phones too, so you don't stand out. That should be good for going unnoticed, for the candid shots. There's a down side, though, too - people who see you taking photos with your phone are more likely to assume the shot is going straight on social media, to either laugh at them or for creepy purposes.