I would argue it is harder and more dangerous. With the phone you need to unlock it, select camera app, then make sure it focuses (which doesn’t work that great at night, you have to look at the screen, tap on the area you want to focus), second thing is that due to low light conditions to avoid blurring you need to be perfectly still (which is hard to do in a moving car, especially if you are driving), this makes you check the picture then retry, then check again etc.
You likely could spend even a minute looking at the screen to make sure you got a good picture. Each time you switch your eyes need to adjust their focus which also takes a second, but that it is insignificant to the rest.
BTW: even changing the radio station takes enough attention to cause accidents (that’s why they started adding controls on the wheel), but taking a picture (especially at night) is way more dangerous.
To be fair, I just press the power button twice and it automatically opens the camera app. I wouldn’t even have to look to take this picture. That said, I don’t use my phone while driving because that shit is dangerous no matter what.
I have Sony Xperia phone which has a physical dedicated camera button, that doubles as a shutter button once camera is activated. Despite of that, no matter how much I tried I failed to take a legible picture of back of my neck (I needed it to be sharp so I could send it to my doctor) and after many tries (even with using a mirror) I gave up and had someone to do it for me.
It is really hard to take a sharp picture of something close without looking, especially with low light conditions.
