The camera you always carry

I have just returned from a work­shop retreat in West­er Ross, on the west coast of Scot­land. The objec­tive of this work­shop was to explore a few loca­tions and cre­ate a port­fo­lio of print­ed work that defined the visu­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the pho­tog­ra­ph­er for the place.

A dif­fer­ent pho­to­graph­ic experience

One of our clients was main­ly using an iPhone for this, and I was inter­est­ed in what would be achieved. My inter­est has been piqued a few times in the past, and I use my own iPhone exten­sive­ly, main­ly as a teach­ing aid. As a teach­ing aid, it can be used to demon­strate dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tions and even some post-pro­cess­ing. I also rec­om­mend it as an aide-mémoire for colours and light­ing for the image you will be tak­ing with your main cam­era. When cap­tur­ing an image, we are some­times forced to over- or under­ex­pose due to pre­vail­ing light­ing con­di­tions, and it can be dif­fi­cult to remem­ber these fac­tors when edit­ing your images some weeks or months lat­er. Ref­er­ence to the phone image can remind you of the inten­si­ty of the light, the depth of the shad­ows and the colours. It is a rea­son­able ref­er­ence as you assess the raw file in post-processing.

You always have your phone with you. There’s that old say­ing, ​‘What is the best cam­era?’ Answer — ​‘the cam­era with you’. What­ev­er you see, wher­ev­er you are, you have your cam­era phone to hand. You can exper­i­ment freely, be cre­ative, and be curi­ous as to whether a scene or com­po­si­tion might work. When trav­el­ling with my DSLR and before get­ting it out of the bag, I will wan­der around, look­ing, try­ing to see suit­able can­di­dates to cap­ture and start to assess poten­tial com­po­si­tions. With­out the per­ceived seri­ous­ness of a larg­er cam­era, there is often a greater will­ing­ness to exper­i­ment, respond instinc­tive­ly and pho­to­graph more freely.

Lim­i­ta­tions exist, but so do opportunities

There are tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions to smart­phones com­pared to larg­er cam­era sys­tems, but these don’t always mat­ter. Per­haps, more impor­tant­ly, they encour­age dif­fer­ent kinds of pho­to­graph­ic engage­ment. Per­haps one of the best fea­tures of using a phone is the dif­fer­ent apps that you can employ. I have been inspired by many mul­ti­ple expo­sure images that I have seen in the past few years and have tak­en it upon myself to learn the tech­niques and exper­i­ment. On my DSLR, I have some capa­bil­i­ties to do this, but on the phone, I have far more sophis­ti­cat­ed options avail­able to me. I can use many more blend­ing modes, enlarge, reduce or rotate images, and use any pho­to ever tak­en on my phone and incor­po­rate it into the final com­pos­ite. There are apps that allow you to take long expo­sures and shoot in Raw if your smart­phone does not offer this capa­bil­i­ty. In short, a cam­era-based phone allows you to be respon­sive and spon­ta­neous. It allows cre­ative exper­i­men­ta­tion, quick­ly and easily. 

The proof is in the seeing

Back to the work­shop retreat I men­tioned ear­li­er. The cul­mi­na­tion of this was the cre­ation of a num­ber of prints to cre­ate a port­fo­lio of work. The phone files used were mul­ti­ple expo­sures and were, I have to say, very impres­sive. The result­ing prints were excel­lent. You would be hard-pressed to tell what sort of cam­era they were tak­en on. More impor­tant­ly, what mat­tered most was not the cam­era that had been used, but the photographer’s way of see­ing and will­ing­ness to experiment.

A dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship with photography

So, in con­clu­sion, the real rev­e­la­tion is not that phones are becom­ing more capa­ble, but that they encour­age a dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship with pho­tog­ra­phy — one built around imme­di­a­cy, exper­i­men­ta­tion, and respon­sive­ness. Of course, spon­tane­ity alone does not cre­ate mean­ing­ful pho­tographs, but the free­dom offered by a smart­phone can encour­age forms of exper­i­men­ta­tion that even­tu­al­ly lead to more per­son­al ways of see­ing. Like any tool, how­ev­er, the ease of smart­phone pho­tog­ra­phy can encour­age super­fi­cial image-mak­ing if exper­i­men­ta­tion is not accom­pa­nied by reflec­tion and intent.