Apr 09 2009
up in the air with the iPhone
I’ve been pondering when to use my iPhone to take a snapshot and when to use my real camera. This photo taken on my flight back from Washington D.C. yesterday is an example of of good time to use the iPhone.
757 with plane reflected in engine housing
As we were flying into the sunset our plane was illuminated but the back side of the engine housing was not. That lighting condition made the engine a perfect mirror to reflect the plane. I could see this because I had the window seat, which also meant that there were two people between me and my camera bag in the overhead storage compartment. All that sunlight also was highlighting the dirt on the window which meant it would never be a great picture, but it was at least an idea worth filing away.
The iPhone camera was a perfect compromise. No one had to move and I’m now able to share a memory.
Mark Harmel
harmelphoto.com
Hello
I’ve been looking through the last few entries on your blog and have been interested because, since July, I have been taking photographs with a mobile phone and, until recently, have been putting them on my blog PICTURES JUST PICTURES and have been really pleased both by the ease of use and the results.
The reason I had to stop using my phone (which was a Samsung SGH D900 i) was that I dropped it down the loo. Awful! I managed to get a replacement through eBay but, although the same in theory, well, it just isn’t. If I’m not careful, the photographs I take with it come out with a pinkish glow.
I would have liked to continue using a mobile phone, in part because I don’t have much money and it’s a practical way to buy something with a reasonable lens without too much expenditure (I was on Pay-as-you-Go) and in part because I was able to walk round with it permanently in the palm of my hand. However, I couldn’t find a replacement that worked as well as the one I broke and I have now bought a little digital camera – a Sony DSC – T77. It is early days still but I’m struggling with it to take pictures with as much ‘life’ in them as I managed with my original mobile phone. (I still hanker back to a very straightforward Olympus SLR camera (OM1) which is where I started with photography.)
An iPhone would have been outside my range, financially, but I’m interested that you are using one in the way you are. Someone recommended I tried one . . . then showed rather bland photos on their blog that they’d taken with theirs . . . they seem to be coated with a bluish mist. But I really like yours; not so much the wing of the plane (though that is interesting) but . . . for instance, the brightly coloured geometric buildings further down the page. Your phone-pictures have the kind of ‘life’ that I appreciate – and which, so far, is absent from mine since I’ve moved to a ‘proper’ digital camera.
Lucy Corrander
PICTURES JUST PICTURES