7/52-27 phoning it in

aka one camera (app) one lens(/film filter) #2

It was a busy, stressful, and wildly exciting week for me, and I had no idea what I wanted to shoot, until I saw this picture from Instagram user @blumenkraft, and off I went!

Much thanks to Jochen Spalding for this hipstarecipe, without which you’d likely be viewing a different sort of phoned in post.

Should I tell you about the stress and excitement? Hummm I think I’ll wait. This deserves a post of its own and not just an aside in 7/52…

Not much else to say on this. Everything was shot with the iPhone 5 and Hipstamatic app, using the John S lens and Robusta film. There’s a bonus pic, trying out the software flash… I haven’t done much with this, but I think there are some possibilities.

It was tough finding appropriate subjects for this treatment: landscapes were either too contrasty or too saturated (due probably to the slight green cast from the John S lens), but I think I got a few shots of interest out of the apartment and the cubby at work. All in all, the 7/52 was fun, and provided a few brief respites from the stress and excitement, and for many uses, I’m more convinced than ever that a phone makes a suitable artistic device, and that (depending on purpose and intent) one might not need a big camera.

There are cases, of course, where a big camera is absolutely needed: when you need or want to zoom in or out and can’t do so with your feet; when you want the telephoto compression or bokeh that only a larger-sensor camera can provide; when you need high detail for product shots or for printing BIG (in which case, you should probably be shooting medium format). Or perhaps you just want to show off…

For my own purposes, the phone works just fine for anything from about 6 inches to 15 feet or so, with some uses for landscapes, and limited (read: artistic) uses for close-up stuff. If I want macro? Big camera. Bokeh? Big camera. Proper zoom lenses? Big camera. Anything other than 28-35mm (the iPhone 5 field of view is roughly equivalent to a 33mm lens on a full frame camera).

Anyway, this is a 7/52 post, not a screed for or against any image capturing device. If you like to shoot, grab whatever you have and make some pictures!