My father loved his Leica, my first boyfriend had a Hasselblad. Same boyfriend, a photographer, got me to buy a Ricohmatic (with the Hasselblad's '2¼sq' format) and I took it to Europe (I'm Australian born) and I guess I did what I am doing now - I worked in black and white then, and I took pictures of a wall of dolls in Amsterdam, a frozen spiderweb in the cloisters of Mont St Michel, a window full of dachshund shaped biscuits in Berlin, a snake of hose pipe in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. Yes, readers, I once knew what to do with an F stop.
And now I work with my iPhone. My iPhone 4 with its chipped case.
pros
1 it's always there
2 it's no heavier than a phone - whoops, it is my phone, so it weighs nothing
3 it takes darn good shots close up
cons
1 you can get delicious 8x10 prints from it - but can't get the ginormous prints that Wolfgang Tillmans can
2 shots of, say, a view from Hungerford Bridge, are not going to thrill you with their devastating depth of field
3 people might not take you seriously
As, ever, let me champion imperfection (see post 8/12/2014), as something not just to celebrate but to work with. Limitations are gifts to creativity. I have a friend whose camera phone is broken - he has been taking amazing transcendental shots through that cracked lens!
Some cool things I have discovered that can happen with iPhone:
● if you angle it you get some of the shot in focus and some not - can give a dreamy effect, or a thrusting effect (or it can look just wrong!)
● if you shoot in low light, the grain can add mystery to the shot
● get in tight and things look heroic
No matter what camera you are working with - learn to love its limitations, lean on them. If you watch Breaking Bad (the commentary on, I think, the final season), you can hear someone loving the way the DOP will allow for flares of light in a shot (it's Jesse holding the lighter, BB fans).
I am tempted to say that the approach I advocate might be described as 50% courage and 50% not caring. That sounds perhaps swaggering, perhaps stupid. Really I work from feeling. My cardinal rule - if something draws me, I shoot. It's either good or bad but there's often something to discover.
Today's photo shows the joy of working with the grain:
And now I work with my iPhone. My iPhone 4 with its chipped case.
pros
1 it's always there
2 it's no heavier than a phone - whoops, it is my phone, so it weighs nothing
3 it takes darn good shots close up
cons
1 you can get delicious 8x10 prints from it - but can't get the ginormous prints that Wolfgang Tillmans can
2 shots of, say, a view from Hungerford Bridge, are not going to thrill you with their devastating depth of field
3 people might not take you seriously
As, ever, let me champion imperfection (see post 8/12/2014), as something not just to celebrate but to work with. Limitations are gifts to creativity. I have a friend whose camera phone is broken - he has been taking amazing transcendental shots through that cracked lens!
Some cool things I have discovered that can happen with iPhone:
● if you angle it you get some of the shot in focus and some not - can give a dreamy effect, or a thrusting effect (or it can look just wrong!)
● if you shoot in low light, the grain can add mystery to the shot
● get in tight and things look heroic
No matter what camera you are working with - learn to love its limitations, lean on them. If you watch Breaking Bad (the commentary on, I think, the final season), you can hear someone loving the way the DOP will allow for flares of light in a shot (it's Jesse holding the lighter, BB fans).
I am tempted to say that the approach I advocate might be described as 50% courage and 50% not caring. That sounds perhaps swaggering, perhaps stupid. Really I work from feeling. My cardinal rule - if something draws me, I shoot. It's either good or bad but there's often something to discover.
Today's photo shows the joy of working with the grain:
garden
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