The 90s: the dawn of the information age. Remember the Matrix, the Spice Girls and plugging a camera into your mobile phone?
The latter was a phenomenal success and by 2003 more integrated camera phones were sold globally than stand alone digital cameras.
Today you are likely to have a multi-tasking 'smart phone', that only just falls short of scrubbing your hard to reach areas or doing the washing up.
Camera phones disgust me. They provide the best opportunity to annoy friends, family and increasingly, the general public. Imagine the situation:
1. You have trustingly left your phone on the side while you pop to the shops only to find on return that your friends have snapped many a revolting thing and sent it to your mum.
2. You're at your favourite band’s gig, but all you can see are extended arms flailing around trying to get a photo. Camera phones have turned us into a society that cares more about documenting life than experiencing it.
3. You are out celebrating getting that new job and have a little too much. Before you know it, and thanks to all your friends carrying camera phones your actions have been recorded and publish in video on the internet.
Now, I can see some benefits to these monstrosities. Something unexpectedly wonderful is happening which merits being caught on camera, yet you foolishly left your digital SLR and tripod in the garage. Camera phone to the rescue.
Technically speaking, the quality of camera phones are abominable, especially if you wish to enlarge your photos for a large piece of wall art or canvas art.
I accept that nowadays camera phones are good enough quality to make really large prints even from a text message.
Amazing, you think? Well just be careful when you go out for a birthday lunch with colleagues and find yourself not only photographed but blown up and put on the office wall.
Unfortunately, real photography is being cornered into covering events instead of the wonders of the every day world. Photographers of the world unite. Pick up your stand-alone camera of choice and start the revolution.