Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

By now, all 24+ timezones are into a new year and a new decade. I hope 2010 is a good one for all of you and I wish you success in all of your pursuits, whether they are personal or professional.

With the bevy of new apps to hit the App Store in 2009, I think 2010 promises to be a great year for iPhoneography. There are a lot of new tools to help us explore our creativity and realize our vision as we capture the moments around us.

I saw a lot of great iPhoneography in 2009. You are creating a lot of great images that a gallery-worthy. I’m excited about all the new exhibits this year, both online and brick-and-mortar, that will be featuring iPhoneography and I hope to see some of your work displayed.

I hope all your light is good and all your apps are stable. I wish you all a very good new year.

As always, thank you for stopping in!

=M=

This year, we got the first white Christmas DFW has had since Texas was a state. Okay, not that long — more like 80 years or so, but we spin ‘em pretty big here in the Lone Star State. It may not be that big a deal to many of you who are used to real winters, but here in DFW, we were wearing shorts and flip-flops just a couple of days ago. That isn’t spin.

However you are spending your day today, whether it’s in snow, on a beach, in a city or out in the country, I wish you the merriest of Christmases this year and I hope your day and your season is filled with family and friends, happiness and love.

=M=

We’re back! I didn’t think we’d be gone this long, but life — day to day life — has a way of creeping in. We were in Hawai’i for a week. I got some decent photos that I’ll be displaying here soon. Once back, I ended up using much more of my available time finishing up a color-correcting project for my day job, Type A Design. It would have been really cool if I could have done some of this color correction on my iPhone in PhotoForge — the app has the tools to handle it. That would have made a great story…!

Anyway, we’re back. I’ve got a long list of reviews to post, images to show and links to share. Enough gabbin’. Back to work….

As always, thank you for stopping by.

=M=

Gray, overcast days can be great days for photography. The clouds diffuse the available light and can make your colors jump. In particular, I like to look for isolated, vivid colors. See what you get….

=M=

You don’t have to photograph everything.

It’s nice to, but sometimes it’s okay to simply enjoy the moment.

=M=

Today, I’m in Seattle taking ProCamera by Daemgen.net for a test. My default camera app has been Camera Genius, despite its lack of a quality zoom. My default digital zoom lens app is the excellent Zoom Lens by BitWink and to me is the standard that must be met with any digital zoom lens app.

What I like about Camera Genius is its excellent anti-shake feature and its rule of thirds gridlines. Features I find compelling in ProCamera are an anti-shake feature and its onscreen tiltometer. ProCamera has gridlines, but they don’t use the rule of thirds. This isn’t really a problem for me as I mostly use gridlines to straighten, not compose, my shot. In this case, ProCamera offers two features to help me do so.

One thing I noticed in testing last night was that ProCamera’s anti-shake feature isn’t as sensitive as Camera Genius’, even at the highest sensitivity setting. This means your shutter snaps quicker. I’ll run some side-by-side comparisons today to see how this effects image sharpness, if at all.

=M=

October 2, 2009

Stacy and I are returning to Seattle for the second time this year. The first time back in February wasn’t a photo trip, even with an SLR. It was a 24 hour mileage run.

This visit is for three days, with as much touristing as we can fit in. Oh, and baseball’s closing day. TEX @ SEA, first pitch 1:05.

Seattle is a great city. The weather promises to be pretty nice if it holds. No SLR. The iPhone is loaded and ready to shoot. I can’t wait to see what Seattle has in store…!

=M=
Marty Yawnick
Creative Director
typeadesign.com

– Post From My iPhone

Welcome to my gallery and to how I see and capture the world.

I love LoFi photography. I have a nice Fuji digital SLR of my own and can use my girlfriend’s Canon Rebel XL any time I need to. I prefer to shoot LoFi. My iPhone is my favorite camera. For me, it provides enough image quality to capture the image, while introducing enough noise, texture, and digital “light leaks” to add presence to the image. I believe that this texture adds to the image much like film type and grain adds to an analog image.

I believe that these limitations make you compose the best possible image in camera, adding a set of criteria that are not present when shooting with a high end camera. There are great moments to capture and images everywhere. Basically, LoFi photography is making art out of snapshots.

I became fascinated with LoFi photography in 2005 and started using Motorola RAZR phone to capture “found images” I stumbled upon. The built-in camera was a very bad, very noisy VGA resolution camera that I thought produced a roughness and a texture that couldn’t be duplicated in any other camera or in Photoshop. I began to compose images for my camera phone, incorporating the limitations of the camera into the images. The RAZR gave my images a very noisy, cold, industrial feel that I felt could be achieved no other way. Ideally, I wanted the images enlarged to poster-size with no interpolation, noise, pixelsa and all — 640 by 480 big squares per oversized print.

Years later, I have my iPhone 2G. The camera in the iPhone is not great, but produces better images with greater contrast and color than my first digital camera, an old Panasonic Lumix 2MP camera. For me, there’s still enough noise to make the images interesting, but the quality of the images is exponentially better and produces much more usable results. I’ve added an arsenal of iPhone camera apps to either help me shoot the scenes that I see or to help me post-process my images to get what I want. All of the images you see on my blog are untouched by Photoshop and are shot, cropped, filtered and processed solely on my iPhone.

I really love the look of high end digital photography and commercially I wouldn’t shoot anything but. But I miss the imperfections of LoFi photography. I believe, however, that those wonderful surprises that the limitations of your equipment produce are far outweighed by the opportunity to capture in photography all the found moments that we all experience everyday.

I hope you enjoy my images. Thank you for visiting.

=M=