[theunspoken]

Even more important than lighting is the ability to manually control the settings of your camera. The photographer mentioned in the post is clearly using a third party camera app (that I too use) which allows to change the shutter speed, ISO and has manual focus capabilities. Would he have gotten the same image if he had had to rely on the automatic settings? No, because then he would have had to change the lights to appease an ever changing and inscrutable iPhone exposure compensation algorithm.

I think we are accustomed to bad smartphone photography not because of the technical specification of the sensors and lenses, but because people simply don't have the time, the will, or even the physical ability of manually shooting the with good pondered settings. In the analog world the same holds true for those cheap single use cameras our parents gave us when going to camp; unless you were lucky all the photos taken would have looked bland and flat, exactly like a quick iPhone snapshot