Life in LoFi: iPhoneography | iPhone Photo News, Showcases, App Reviews

I’m big on taking safety shots. Storage is ridiculously cheap compared to a few years ago. I’ve got plenty of room on my iPhone to shoot more images than I need. There’s no excuse not to shoot safety shots when the subject affords you the opportunity.

Read the rest of this entry →

This is a call for entries! Life In LoFi has teamed with CanvasPop to present the “Shades of Summer” LoFi Photo Contest — Life In LoFi’s first photo contest. The contest runs now through June 29, 2011. We’ve got some great prizes we’ll be giving away. Click past the jump to find out all the details and how to enter.

Read the rest of this entry →

We cover photography basics often here. Although I believe that the iPhone is a special camera because of the number of post-processing apps available for it, it’s still a camera. In order to get the best possible photographs, you need to start with the best possible capture.

In case you missed it a while ago, Amy-Mae Elliott wrote a great piece on Mashable covering photography basics as they relate to smartphones — all of them, not just the iPhone. If you’re new to mobile phone photography, it’s got good tips to help capture better photos in-camera. If you’ve been shooting a while, it’s a good refresher read.

In most cases, the phone has become our primary camera, but despite tech developments that can see high-end options, most of us have 5-megapixel or less snappers with limited functionality. But this doesn’t mean you can’t take great photos — it just means you have to be smart about getting the right shot.

Click here to read all of “How To Master Smartphone Photography” on Mashable.

~~~~

If you’re just discovering iPhoneography or photography in general, advice from someone with even just a little more time than you have can be a welcome gift. A lot of photographers over the years have given me guidance, either in person or through their writings. Each of them have helped me to discover my vision as a photographer or helped me better understand my tools.

Although these tips are presented in the context of iPhoneography, they’re good advice for any novice photographers, as well as a reminder of the basics for those who’ve been shooting a while.

Here are some of the tips that I’ve learned or was given along the way. >>>

Read the rest of this entry →

Photo by Noriko Ohba/tea-room.net

A camera doesn’t need a lens. You can use a light-proof box with a tiny hole at one end. Congratulations! You’ve got a pinhole camera.

Pinhole camera effects are popular in lo-fi and retro iPhone photo apps. Camera+ has even tried to perfect it in the last two app updates.

Click past the jump for Smashing Magazine’s gallery of analog pinhole photography. >>>

Read the rest of this entry →

"The South Bank" by Andre Harry. Shot with a BlackBerry 9700.

I often hang out in the Droidography groups on Flickr. Even with the limited number of photo apps, there’s some cool photography created on the OS. I was clicking around Reddit today and stumbled across two mobile phone photography sites I’d never seen. I really liked a lot of the photography that I saw. Even with minimal processing, there were some great images.

The device? BlackBerry.

Read the rest of this entry →

Knox Bronson from Pixels – The Art of the iPhone shared this link with me recently and I thought I would pass it on.

The Atlantic has just published an excellent piece by Alexis Madrigal called “Hipstamatic and the Time When Photographs Looked Like Paintings”. It’s less about Hipstamatic and in the piece, Madrigal draws some interesting parallels to iPhoneographers of today and the pictorialist photographers of the turn of the 20th century.

The piece is a good overview and commentary of the beginnings of photography as art. There’s a bit of photography history in there, too. In my opinion, it ends a little abruptly and I wish Madrigal was permitted to write about another 2,000 words. As an iPhoneographer, this has to make you feel better about the art form, as it makes a very good case that history is on our side.

Frederick Evans’ 1896 photograph Kelmscott Manor: Attics looks for all the world like the work of human hands. Dreamy and soft, we look down from one end of an attic along the trusses and beams of a roof toward an open area where light floats in from our left. Alternating strips of grays remind us that photographs were just complex configurations of light, dark, light. And yet, right around this time, they became something more. They became art.

Be sure to read the very lively discussion in the comments after the article.

Click here to read the entire story on TheAtlantic.com. >>>

~~~~

During one of my daily perusal of the App Store today, I came across what I thought was a new photo app, The Diana by Allan Detrich. The Diana camera is one of the classic cameras for modern day lo-fi photography. I thought “Cool! I’d drop a buck for a Diana-like photo app!”

Turns out, The Diana is not a toy camera app. It’s a history of the Diana and all of its variations. Read on to see how in this instance, this is not a bad thing at all….

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s about one month until eyephoneography, a high-visibility exhibition at The Hub in Madrid, Spain. This inaugural show features the works of Sion Fullana, Marco La Civita, Isabelle “MissPixels” Gagné, and Greg Schmigel.

We recently posted a link to the interview of Darren Milligan, one of the show’s selection committee. In the lead-up to the Madrid show, the eyephoneography blog has posted an interview with Sally Gutierrez Dewar, another member of the show’s selection committee. In particular, I found her views on smart phones and how they are effecting our everyday lives interesting. She also discusses her favorite images of each photographer in the exhibit — they are four excellent and visually powerful images. Sion’s is one of my favorites from his catalog and the image she selected by by Marco is powerful, stark and moving.

Other technologies have had an impact on what could be called our modes of seeing, but smartphones and social networks are radically mutating the whole sphere of visual thinking, shifting it from the individualistic gaze to communities of vision.

The entire interview is here on the eyephoneography blog.

eyephoneography #1 opens September 17, 2010 at The Hub in Madrid, Spain. Visit eyephoneography.com for more information.

=M=

~~~~

We’re about a month away from eyephoneography, a high-visibility exhibition at The Hub in Madrid, Spain. This inaugural show features the works of Sion Fullana, Marco La Civita, Isabelle “MissPixels” Gagné, and Greg Schmigel.

Darren Milligan is one of the judges of the show and was recently interviewed on the eyephoneography blog. He is a designer and director of digital media projects at the Center for Education and Museum Studies at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and he’s been creating mobile phone photography for years prior to his iPhone. He has a strong visual background and it’s very interesting to read his insights on iPhone photography, mobile phone photography, and his thoughts on several of the pieces in the Madrid exhibit.

Photography, for me, has always been deeply involved in my own process of memory-making. An image of a moment or place from my past is a tool: a key to unlock the rich replay of that experience. I became aware of the power of mobile photography several years ago when I moved to Washington and looked for a method to document my explorations of a new city and to witness the ways that city would inevitably change me.

The entire interview is here on the eyephoneography blog.

eyephoneography #1 opens September 17, 2010 at The Hub in Madrid, Spain. You can visit eyephoneography.com for more information, or read our previous announcement on Life In LoFi here.

=M=

~~~~