Always
On.
My DSLR is my first love — a weighty, deliberate, irreplaceable companion on every set. But the iPhone Pro? That is something else entirely. That is my shadow. My second eye. My constant.
“My DSLR is the camera I work with. My iPhone Pro is the camera I live with. And a model who doesn’t understand the difference between working and living has never truly learned to see.”
My First
Love
Let me be clear about one thing from the start: no phone — not even the most extraordinary one Apple has ever made — replaces my DSLR. My Canon EOS R5 is a precision instrument, a tool I have spent years learning to speak the language of. It captures the raw, uncompressed truth of fabric in motion, of a look that lasts a quarter of a second, of light that exists only once. The latitude in the RAW files, the depth of field I can sculpt with a 50mm f/1.2 — these are not things you replicate. They are things you revere.
On every professional set, my DSLR is there. In the hands of a photographer I trust, or occasionally in my own, it is the instrument of record. When a campaign demands perfection — technical, absolute, unforgiving perfection — nothing else will do.
My Second
Soul
And yet. Life does not happen on set. Life happens in the back of a taxi crossing the Ponte Vecchio as the river goes gold. Life happens in a dressing room in Seoul when the stylist steps out and the light from the window is simply perfect. Life happens when a friend laughs in a way that deserves to be preserved, when a coastline appears from a train window without warning, when you find yourself — as I so often do — seeing a photograph before you have time to think about capturing it.
In those moments, the DSLR is not there. It is in a case, in a bag, in a hotel room. The iPhone Pro is in my hand. Always. And it is extraordinary.
“The DSLR knows what I intend to capture. The iPhone Pro knows what I can’t help but capture — and that, perhaps, is the more honest photographer of the two.”
— Amruta Phulsundar, on why she never leaves without bothWhat the Pro
Sees
I am particular about skin tones — neurotically, professionally particular. I have stood in front of cameras my entire career and I know, immediately and viscerally, when a device has misread my complexion. The iPhone Pro does not misread. The colour science is sympathetic to the full range of human skin in a way that many cameras — even expensive ones — are not. It renders warmth where warmth exists. It holds shadow detail in the places that would otherwise flatten and falsify.
The Photographic Styles feature is, for me, one of the genuinely great design decisions in recent phone history. It is not a filter. It is not a preset slapped on top of reality. It is a tuning of the entire rendering process — and once I found my setting, a slightly warmed tone with lifted shadows, I stopped editing my personal photos almost entirely. The phone simply sees the way I want to see.
Depth That
Understands
Portrait mode on the iPhone Pro is not, as some dismiss it, a party trick. It is a genuinely sophisticated reading of spatial relationships — and it handles faces with a delicacy that comes, I suspect, from the enormous volume of human portraits that informed its training. It knows where to fall soft and where to hold detail. It understands that the ear is less important than the eye, that the background should whisper rather than shout.
I photograph myself in it regularly — not from vanity, but from necessity. A model’s relationship with her own image is a working relationship. I need to see how I look between calls, how the light falls in an unfamiliar space, whether the colour I’m wearing in a screen test reads the way I hope. The iPhone Pro gives me an honest, beautiful answer every time.
“I film myself walking and the footage looks tracked. I film from a car and it looks like we had a rig. I once shot a brand teaser from a boat in the Adriatic and the stabilisation held through every wave.”
— Amruta Phulsundar, on Cinematic Mode and optical stabilisationThe Camera
That Moves
Video is where the iPhone Pro earns a level of my respect I did not expect to give it. The optical image stabilisation — combined with what Apple calls Action mode — compensates for the physical reality of being a person in motion in a world that refuses to hold still. I am not, by nature, a still person. I travel constantly, I move quickly, I film in conditions that would embarrass lesser equipment. The Pro absorbs all of it.
Cinematic mode, which racks focus between subjects in the manner of a professional camera operator, has become genuinely important to how I document my life. I turn it on and the footage looks considered — not shot, but composed. It adds a grammar to video that most phones produce as mere transcription.
For the
Serious Work
Apple Log video recording is the feature that surprised me most. It gives the footage a flat, wide-latitude profile that, in post, can be shaped into almost anything. I have handed iPhone Pro footage to my video editor — a woman who works primarily with Arri Alexa material — and she has graded it without comment. Without complaint. The dynamic range is not infinite, but it is generous, and generous is enough when the shot you need is the shot only your phone can get.
I use it to film backstage content, personal campaigns for my own platforms, and the kind of spontaneous documentation that brands increasingly want — the unguarded moment, the real texture of a life. The Pro delivers it all with a consistency that professional videographers notice and compliment without always knowing the source.
Six Times the iPhone Pro
Proved Its Place
At a dinner in a candlelit château in Bordeaux, I photographed a table that deserved to be remembered. No flash, no tripod, no crew. The Pro found the light that was barely there and made it generous, warm, and true. My DSLR would have needed ten minutes to set up. The Pro needed two seconds.
Unlike a filter, Styles are baked into the capture process itself — they influence how the camera meters, renders shadows, and handles colour temperature. Once I dialled in my personal setting, my entire phone roll acquired a coherent visual identity. My archive now reads as a portfolio, not a random collection.
The telephoto lens on the Pro Max — 5x optical — lets me compress backgrounds in a way that previously required a full camera setup. I use it constantly for street photography and self-portraits where I want the background to feel like a painted wash behind the sharpness of my face. It changes the compositional vocabulary entirely.
Running for a flight through Heathrow, phone in hand filming the story of it — because every model’s life is a story that her audience wants to be part of — and the footage is smooth. Useable. Professional. Action mode turns my body’s perpetual motion into a visual asset rather than a liability.
ProRAW captures an uncompressed DNG file with all the computational intelligence of the iPhone’s processing applied as metadata rather than a hard bake. In editing, the latitude is remarkable. I can lift shadows, recover highlights, and shift colour temperature the way a studio photographer would — but from a phone I had in my jacket pocket.
The moment I lower the phone, the footage is on my MacBook, in my edit suite, in my creative director’s inbox. The integration between device and workflow is invisible in the best sense — it does not interrupt the process of creation. For a model whose content pipeline never stops, this seamlessness is not convenience. It is currency.
DSLR vs iPhone Pro — For Personal Use
| Scenario | DSLR |
iPhone Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Always in your pocket | ✕ | ✓ |
| Candlelit dinner photographs | ◐ With effort | ✓ Night Mode |
| Spontaneous video, moving | ✕ | ✓ Optical Stabilisation |
| Backstage content creation | ✕ Too conspicuous | ✓ Discreet, immediate |
| Self-portraits with compression | ◐ Needs tripod + remote | ✓ 5× telephoto, self-timer |
| Instant sharing to team | ✕ Requires tethering | ✓ AirDrop, iCloud |
| Editable RAW capture | ✓ Industry standard | ✓ Apple ProRAW |
| Professional campaign work | ✓ Irreplaceable | ◐ For certain campaigns |
The Camera That Lives My Life With Me
I was asked recently, at a panel on fashion and technology, whether I thought the phone would eventually replace the camera. I said no — and I meant it absolutely. But I also said something I believe with equal conviction: the phone has not replaced the camera. It has replaced the absence of a camera. And for a model, for an artist, for any person who moves through the world with the habit of noticing — that is not a small thing. That is everything.
My DSLR makes me a better professional. My iPhone Pro makes me a more complete person. It is the difference between the work I do and the life I live. And I intend to keep living it, one perfect ProRAW frame at a time.