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, pixels 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=
