So I keep getting asked if I will teach people smartphone photography, so I thought I would put out some feelers as it were to find out what people want from their smartphone photography. If you are one of the many people who have asked me to teach them, could you please help me help you by answering the questions below and please feel free to share this post with anyone who may be interested in learning more about smartphone photography.
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So the school holidays are now in full swing, we have just had a lovely family holiday in Whitby, the home of Bram Stoker's Dracula, However, leading up to our break away I was in a dilemma, you see every holiday we've had I have always taken my dslr and ALL my lenses, you know, because if you leave one lens behind that will be the one you need the most, yeah? you've been there too! The trouble is, I take my big bulky dslr and ALL the lenses, plus the tripod and all my filters and you know what? I probably take three, maybe four photographs and that's it, even though they don't mind one bit if I take off somewhere and spend a few hours taking photos, I always feel that I should be with them and enjoying our holiday together, as a family. So this time I left my big bulky dslr and ALL my lenses and filters at home, instead all I packed was my tripod and my iPhone and guess what? I took more photographs than ever before on a family holiday without leaving them once, just snapping things as we went along, from Whitby, Robin Hoods Bay, Staithes, Saltwick Bay and Sandsend and not once did I regret leaving the big boy camera at home
The annual Handmade Parade took place last weekend here in Hebden Bridge. As always it was amazing, bonkers and full of colour, we truly do have some talented and creative people in the Calder Valley, a big up to all who organise and make the the costumes.
Sometimes the beauty of iPhoneography is capturing something that's really simple but different enough to make the images your own, I often photograph subjects that are just lying around the house and try and find different ways of shooting them.
Fidget spinners are such a great subject, I'm not sure which is more addictive, spinning them or photographing them, both are equally just as much fun, especially on a drab rainy day. For these images I mounted my iPhone on my tripod used a small LED light to light the subject and with the Slow Shutter app used various shutter speeds from 1/4 to 2 seconds. The images were edited on the iPhone using Snapseed and the whole process was finished in a matter of minutes. Quick, simple, effective! Flowers as a subject for photography has always been my nemesis, I could never capture them how I wanted to see them and it's a subject that I still go back to every so often to try and improve my techniques. For me it's all about light, or how to light them so that you can see the detail and the fragility in the petals.
I think I'm starting to get there ...maybe We are lucky to live where we do, elevated enough to get great views of the surrounding hills and awesome sunsets. This is when the panoramic mode on the iPhone camera comes in to it's own
Every camera has it's limits and knowing where those limits are will help you get the best out of that camera. Of course the mobile phone is extremely limited, even if it has millions of pixels, because the sensor is so tiny and it's the sensor that makes the difference. This is often why a phone camera struggles in low light, there's a few apps out there that can help and of course using a tripod will be important but the noise levels (grain in the image) will still be evident.
A few weeks ago we had this beautiful sunflower in the house and I wanted to capture it with my iPhone, the window light was making the images too bland and flat so I mounted an LED light on a stand to give me a more dramatic light (I'm such a sucker for the dramatic light) but not over doing it as I still felt it was important to capture the fragility of the flower. Very little post editing was done for these images, just a slight crop for one or two and a slight increase in contrast using the Snapseed app. This is my much loved bass guitar, I've owned for 20 years although I don't play it anywhere near as much as I should
Meet Murphy, he was our 11 year old Boxer who sadly passed away in November 2016, typically he could be as daft as a brush, but the reason I'm posting this image is because it's the first photo I took with the iPhone.
He is greatly missed but as you'll see in later blog posts he didn't leave us before he met our new Boxer puppy, Izzie who he adored When I shoot landscapes with my main camera, usually the tank that is the Canon EOS 1DS Mark II, I shoot a lot of long exposures which range from just a couple of minutes up to 45 minutes. I wanted to see if I could create long exposures with the iPhone using the Long Expo app. So one Sunday afternoon I headed out to a local waterfall called Goit Stock to try it out. Of course with any long exposure you need to make sure that your camera is rock steady so I mounted the iPhone to my tripod to make sure there was no camera shake. I set the exposure to 30 seconds, now of course this is simulated as the shutter doesn't actually stay open for that long and as you can see it's quite effective
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