I’ve never had much time for phones cameras. It takes almost ten seconds to get mine up and operating by which time the moment’s usually gone. The image quality deteriorates fast on zoom and enlargement, there’s a lack of anything but auto exposure and I hate that almost everyone shoots what should be landscape (horizontal) pictures in portrait (vertical) mode. My Canon Ixus is significantly smaller and lighter than my phone and murders it for picture taking in every respect.

Paul Burrows has edited Australian Camera magazine since Kodak Tri-X Pan film was a photography staple and I figured he'd have similar views. And he does, but for entirely different reasons. He says phone cameras are devaluing photography. He calls it the 'snap, share and instantly forget' mentality.

"So many images are being lost because no thought is being given to how they’re stored or even retrieved," he said.

"Not only is nobody making prints anymore, only a handful of people manage their image files adequately. Photography has become another victim of the throw-away society and camera phones facilitate this. They have turned picture-taking into something that’s mindless and consequently no longer valued.

"A good proportion of the massive NSW State Library photography archive is made up of family albums and unearthed shoeboxes of old prints. They’re considered generally more valuable historically than professional photography. A good deal of social history has been written in photographs, often snapshots, that indirectly document much more than just the subject matter; things like fashions, cars, architecture and so on. Pictorial archivists are already lamenting the loss of this source of social documentation.