Lovely piece by Om Malik on the iPhone and comparing it to the original point-and-shoot.

A century apart, many professionals still miss the point. Photography is about people and their creation of their own narratives. As Dr. Michael Pritchard, President of the U.K-based Royal Photographic Society, said in an interview, “The Brownie was transformative because it allowed people to take photographs, get decent results most of the time and then share those photographs through the family album, in a way it was much quicker and simpler to do without having any technical knowledge.”

The professional photographers often get caught up in the technology, forgetting that how people engage with image making is just as important, if not more so. It should also be acknowledged that casual photographers are the ones who have given the industry its much needed scale, helping further the development of new technologies.