TEXAS WITH MY IPHONE

at first, i intended this post to be about the experience of san antonio and austin, the people i met, the food, the sights and sounds of these two "little-big cities" that texans really pride themselves with.  then as i ran through my photos, i remembered the story of the images and felt that writing about the process of the iphone-only-photo-project was more intriguing.  so here goes...

in an effort to challenge myself as an amateur photographer, i armed myself with only my iphone 4G and head out each day to find and create images in a new and exciting place.  using the capability of the iphone and a selection of apps, i wanted to see if i would still be able to tell the story of my travels similar to what i could do with my more expensive and more cumbersome  SLR gear.  and to answer your first question, yes - i felt a little naked without my usual gear for this trip, but in order to really challenge yourself, sometimes you gotta run alone in unfamiliar situations.

there definitely is something liberating about not having to lug around a pack of equipment as you wander the streets of a strange place.  you really never quite know who is watching and licking their chops at a chance to rob you and steal your expensive equipment from under your nose.  having all of my necessary photo gear in my front pocket was definitely both convenient and comfortable.

as i walked around, i immediately noticed my first real limitation of only having my iphone camera at my disposal: it wasn't possible to capture all the images my eyes were seeing.  what i mean by that is that i couldn't zoom in/out with the kind of accuracy i'm accustomed to.  the iphone really put limitations on how i traditionally like to compose my images, whether the subject is an object or a scene.  and the zoom on the iphone is terrible, diminishing the quality of the photo with every mm of digital zoom.  i only shoot iphone images on the default focal length...no zoom.  ever.  the solution was to use my legs as my zoom and really look at things differently, managing my physical position to compose the image whether it was a flower or an architectural detail of a building.  sometimes i couldn't really capture what my eyes saw and though there were some failed images, the need to move around and find the image was definitely a good exercise for my eyes and brain.

after composition, the next problem i had was exposure.  because the iphone is essentially a watered down point and shoot device, the issue of exposure is magnified since there is even more lack of control on an iphone.  depending on the time of day and the position of the source light (i.e. the sun) iphone photos tend to be ridiculously overexposed in the day and severely underexposed in low light conditions.   to combat these issues, i am reminded that great lighting during the day is usually found in shaded areas or around sunset. failing that, i tried to use image hot spots as part if not the main point of interest of the image, almost using it to add dimension to an otherwise plain image.  in low light situations, i put the camera into HDR mode and trusted that the iphone's software would do its thing to bring up detail in the dark areas (if that's what i wanted).  HDR on the iphone is not the most accurate way to do real HDR, but it's a nice try (i think i'll address HDR in a future blog).  photos in low light also tend to have a lot of noise in the dark areas and are usually quite blurry.  unless absolutely necessary, i usually don't go for a lot of night shots with the iphone.

so after a bit of complaining, it may sound like that the iphone-only-photo-project was a complete disaster.  actually - no.  one of the things i really enjoyed was the immediate creative aspect of iphone photography.  photography apps are an inexpensive way to take your iphone and make it a canvas for your artistic talents.  you don't even need to have artistic talents to take an image and enhance it with the numerous preloaded filters or selective color edits that can be bought in the app store.  personally, my iphone is loaded with colorblast, instagram, camera+ and photosynth.  these apps do a great job of giving personality to any of my iphone photos that need a little "oomph".  load a photo, press a few buttons and i can take any ordinary photo and add vignette, a fancy border, over saturation or even make it look vintage.  but my favorite app by far is photosynth, which allows me to take a string of overlapped photos in order which is then automatically stitched in a way to make it into a panoramic image.  love this app and the product that is generated after a few short minutes of capture/calculation/rendering.

edited with photosynth

like any travel photo project, it is the images that tell the story.  and instead of putting a caveat on these images and almost excusing myself for taking them with an iphone, i'm pointing out proudly that these great images were in fact taken with one.  composition, exposure, quality are just technical jargon that may make an image easier to look at, but not necessarily be the complete reason why we like an image over another.  sometimes an image reminds us of a place, feeling or moment and at face value might not be a technically perfect image.  the key lesson learned on the iphone-only-photo-project is that taking the best image for a particular time/place does not have to be achieved by use of an expensive SLR and high quality lens or even composed by the conventional "rules" of photography.  just take the photo with whatever works for you and freeze the moment.  no matter what it looks like, you will always appreciate it afterwards.

de jesus.  just shoot.