iPhonography

In case you haven’t seen the latest Apple commercial—and Apple is pretty renown for commercials—the computer and phone giant claims, “everyday, more photos are taken with an iPhone than with any other camera.” That’s not hard to believe. Counting all six generations, there are somewhere near 200 million iPhones on the street worldwide. Unlike DSLRs and point-and-shoot cameras, we always seem to have our phones with us. That convenience has equated to billions of photos.

Search for “photography” in the iTunes app store and you will get over 8,500 results. “Cameras” will find 4,700 hits and there are over 1,200 “photo editing” apps. But amongst the Apple hype and the iPhones held aloft at every event and landmark, how many compelling artistic images are taken on phones?

Recently, I attended a conference at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. Jekyll Island and the club and mansions now making up the hotel were once an enclave for the richest families in America—Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, and Pulitzers among them—once made this their private retreat. In fact, the members of the club accounted for one sixth of the U.S.’s total wealth by World War II.

But despite the beauty and history here, I was without a camera. Except for my iPhone 5. Sometimes, you just get tired lugging around a thirty pound camera bag. So for three days, I set out to determine if I could take great photos, images becoming of a professional photographer, with an 8 MP iPhone camera. I’ve included a few samples.

I’m convinced that iPhones, and phone cameras in general, have reached a point where snapshots can transcend to art. Obviously, many photogs agree. Adhering to the same rules of composition, exposure, and light are really no different. Controlling shutter speed seems impossible until you realize—well, there’s an app for that.

I must admit that a couple of my images were tweaked a bit using East Coast Pixel’s Photo Toaster.  I’m a big fan of this app. From subtle sharpening or exposure adjustments to radical photo manipulations, this app has a lot to offer.

Old Soldiers and Cellphone Cameras

Boredom can sometimes be a wonderful--a great source of inspiration at least. While playing tonight at a wedding reception in Columbus, Georgia at the National Infantry Museum, I had a few minutes to kill and walked around looking at the uniforms on mannequins in glass cases. One of them really caught my eye and I had to try a photo with the camera on my iPhone. The result was pretty cool, almost lifelike. You just don't need a great camera to take a great photo.Just a little dramatic light and an eye for composition.

Taking the theme just a bit further, I tried running the image through PhotoToaster, an app I've had for a while from East Coast Pixels. It really is a healthy slice of Photoshop for the iPhone.From basic exposure and levels to cool presets imulating cross processing, film grain, texturizing, HDR, and other effects, this nifty app lets you put a very polished look on the images you've captured with your phone.

For just a few bucks, this app is a winner. The utilties and effects are quite convincing and it also gives you multiple options for saving your processed images back to your phone, to an email, or even Flickr or Facebook.