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use what you've got

31/1/2015

1 Comment

 
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:

Picture
garden
1 Comment
Kevin
31/1/2015 12:43:34 pm

Such a refreshing approach. Great image.

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    Performer and theatremaker Peta Lily  has been taking photographs for the last five years. Her aesthetic has been to use her iPhone camera to capture the world close up and with an immediacy that is both surprising and moving.

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