From the Editor’s Desk: Seeking a Little Expertise ⭐

Our daughter totaled her car recently. She’s fine, but like many Americans, she literally needs a car, if only to get to work every day. And so this set off a flurry of activity, complicated by my wife and me being in Mexico at the time. But it wasn’t just that. As I mentioned in What I Use: Mexico, September to November 2025 ⭐, we had benefited from a relationship with a man named Ali who owned a car repair business in our area of Pennsylvania. Ali was instrumental in helping us with all my family’s cars, including the car Kelly just totaled. But Ali passed away almost a year ago.

I feel this loss personally because Ali was one of those special people I always loved seeing and spending time with. But I also felt it on a different level when we learned about Kelly’s car accident. We’re in Mexico, she’s in North Carolina, and Ali is gone. How on earth were we going to figure this out, and quickly, without him? He would have shown up for us. He would have come through for us. That’s who he was.

Looking past the personal element, what we were missing was Ali’s expertise.

As any adult can tell you, especially if they own a home or a business, finding people you can trust is crucial. If you’re a home owner, these people should include a carpenter, electrician, or plumber, for example. We had the absolute best of each when we were still living in Massachusetts, we’ve done pretty well in Pennsylvania, and we even found a guy here in Mexico, through a neighbor in the building, who is a truly skilled Jack of all trades.

For Kelly’s next car, we muddled through it and everything seems to have worked out. Kelly found a used Toyota RAV4 that we had inspected by a local mechanic there, and she seems to like it quite a bit. Ali had practically begged us to trade-in our old BMW, many times, for a Honda or Toyota because the parts for our car are so expensive and often take a long time to obtain. It was why Kelly and our son Mark both had Hondas. And it was why Kelly ended up with a Toyota: Ali may be gone, but his expertise lives on in this small way because we remember his advice and often talk about this. He was the expert. We trusted his expertise. And we may never really replace him.

In my tech-adjacent field, there are experts, there are pretenders, and there are those who have just given up, replacing valuable how-to content with advertising that’s not even thinly veiled anymore. The world is circling the drain in so many ways, and I keep one eye on the calendar, wondering when I will cross some line where the horrible crap all around me just doesn’t matter anymore. I’m not there yet, and I hope I never am. But this is a battle of wills and the deck is stacked against me.

In some ways, subject matter experts are a dime a dozen if you only focus on that single thing they understand better than most. But the truly special people are those who have a unique set of skills, like being able to communicate their expertise clearly and in ways that even mainstream audiences will appreciate. Back in the day, as old-timers like me say, those people were typically book authors or magazine columnists (or both). These days, they’re often making videos on YouTube or elsewhere.

When I joined the company that published Windows NT Magazine (later Windows 2000 Magazine, Windows & .NET Magazine, and then Windows IT Pro Magazine) in 1998, the publisher had no shortage of subject matter experts. What it lacked was experts who could also write well. There were exceptions, of course, like Mark Minasi, who was also one of the best public speakers I’ve ever seen, a rare triple threat and a true talent. But in those days, having a strong editorial team and a stringent process for technical and copy editing was key, and so that’s what we did.

I don’t like the term expert being applied to me, but I acknowledge that I know more about certain technical topics than most people, and I am at least eager to help others. But I, too, need help sometimes. In many cases, this is as simple as searching Google or whatever AI nonsense is replacing Google. I often get programming help on Stack Overflow. But if it’s a big enough topic, a complicated topic, one needs to dive deeper and spend the time to learn. In the past, this was often done through books, but as the world evolved, the sources expanded and changed. Video is big now, of course, and YouTube has emerged as a key way to consume information.

It’s interesting to find experts this way.

Years ago, I came across Ray Maker of DC Rainmaker fame, most likely while researching a smartwatch or other wearable. He is an expert, someone who really understands the topic they cover, in his case fitness wearables, and he can explain it quite well. And if you’re not into video, no worries, he has a blog too. If you want to step outside of our industry, I often point to people like Rick Steves, a European travel expert, and Julia Childs, the iconic original influencer who brought French cooking to America. But there are many others, and many reading this probably have their favorites for whatever topics.

Over the course of this trip to Mexico, I’ve been trying to figure out phone-based video for the Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries series of articles. I don’t shoot a lot of video, and I don’t usually think about this topic all that much. But my wife and I do have a YouTube channel, and both of us are interested in going further with video. Life is short, but I’ve made some inroads in things like video editing, in the sense that experience over time has strengthened my skills. But video is difficult and time consuming. There’s a lot there.

Most of those reading this know that I take a lot of photos, and it’s reasonable to think that there is some overlap there. But when it comes to digital photography, in particular smartphone-based photography, I’m no expert. I know more about this topic than most mainstream users, yes. But I’m a point-and-click person who takes snapshots, not a professional. Thanks to steady advances in camera lenses and computational photography, the pictures I’ve taken over the years have grown in quality. And thanks to the ever-increasing capacity of the storage in these devices, I’ve taken more and more photos each year, too. (I’m old enough to remember the days of rolls of film with 24 or 36 shots on each and a confusing array of ISO choices.) I’m not sure what I am. An enthusiast photographer, perhaps?

Whatever you want to call me, I started looking for experts in the smartphone photography space a few months back, at first with an emphasis on video. This year being this year, there are plenty of pretenders, and there is a lot of contrary advice. And with the caveat that I’m still honing this down a bit, there are two people who have so far passed whatever personal litmus test it is that I am administering, both on YouTube. And one general remark about the state of this part of the market that, frankly, is a bit confusing to me.

So let me start with that. No matter what anyone thinks of the companies or phone platforms in question here, it is undeniably true that most creators, experts, and professionals who work in the smartphone photography space prefer the iPhone, almost universally, over Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy, or any other Android smartphones. This is confusing to me because, in my experience, and I have a lot of experience, I can get good shots out of an iPhone, but I often have to work at it. Meanwhile, Pixel consistently delivers amazing shots in any conditions all the time. This is not a subtle difference. It’s obvious.

Does this mean that the iPhone-loving pros are somehow wrong? Or, in the more likely scenario, that I am wrong? Not necessarily. Leaving aside the sometimes unexplainable aspects of Apple bias in the creative space, this is probably just experts spending the time to more fully master tools that they care about. And to be fair to everyone involved Apple improves those products accordingly. But it’s also fair to point out that, in many cases, there is a professional workflow in play involving tools like Lightroom and technologies like RAW photos I will probably never be interested in. Many of the most impressive iPhone photos were taken without Apple’s default filters and processing and were edited by experts using professional tools.

That’s not the snapshot experience I’m used to. But there’s nothing wrong with it, either. In keeping with my commentary above about experts, what I’m looking for is those experts who can translate their skills for people like me who will never master any of those tools but still want to take better photos (and videos). That is, they’re not necessarily speaking to other experts, they’re speaking to the rest of us. Or at least those of us who care enough to want to improve in this area to some degree.

This is obviously not definitive, it’s just two people in a wasteland of content whose quality exists on a vast spectrum. But they have each in their own way each taught me a few things and held my attention. I should acknowledge how rare that is.

They are:

• Tyler Stalman, a professional photographer and iPhone user, and the creator of the Stalman clamp for the iPhone.
• C. Scott Brown, a Pixel fan who’s also a senior editor at Android Authority. I landed on him first while I was researching video recording on Pixel, which I’m still trying to figure out.

Of the two, Stalman is more obviously an expert and Brown is perhaps more of an enthusiast, but whatever. I have found both of their YouTube channels to be interesting and useful. They have informed my understanding of this field and, in Stalman’s case, re-triggered an interest in actually figuring out how to make photography work more consistently on the iPhone.

This is, in some ways, classic me. I set off to write something and then churn out thousands of words on another topic, sometimes related to what I thought I’d be writing, and sometimes less so. That’s how this article came about, in fact.

When I had finally decided to order an iPhone 17 Pro Max, I started writing a preview article that should have been a straightforward rundown of why and what. Instead, I wrote what became From the Editor’s Desk: Good Decisions, Less Good Decisions ⭐ because sometimes these things take on a life of their own. No problem, I thought. I’ll start over. When I did, I wrote what became this article. I did finally write my iPhone preview, of course. But it was almost an afterthought by that time. I am more consumed by these other topics now.

I’m still learning about smartphone photography and video. These are big topics, like rabbit holes in which it’s easy to get lost. But I will have more to say about them soon.