September 2010 Wallpaper

In honor of being at the 2010 SCCA National Solo Championships this week, we'll go with some worn out, texture-rich, corded racing tire goodness.

Grab a MacBook nice size above, or jump to a cinema display or old school 4:3 flavor if that's your thing.

Goodbye St. John and iPhonetography

We left St. John yesterday. Back to the grind of the real world. The good news is that I've got a 147 frames to edit through, so I can sort of relive things for a little while. I snapped these two shots with the iPhone on the ferry and had posted them to my Flickr account, Twitter and Facebook before we set foot on St. Thomas. (There's still some issues with the Wordpress iPhone app that need to be worked out a bit.)

I've gotten some questions about how I've processed some of these. So here's the scoop:

A few weeks ago, I apparently drank some of the Chase Jarvis Kool-Aid. The flavor being the Best Camera concept. The Reader's Digest version of that concept is that the best camera is the one that you have with you. For Jarvis that came to be the iPhone's built-in camera.

If I don't have my Canon 5DMk2 with me, I have the G9. In fact, around town it's almost always in my bag. It's easily the best point and shoot I've had. Don't get me wrong, it still has some weak points. Chiefly the shutter lag. If it had a shutter response that was more akin to the 5D or any of my old film cameras I'd have no complaints with the camera.

Still, there's a few times, when the G9 is just out of reach or it's still in the bag in the office. But, I'm never without my iPhone. And the camera is decent if not spectacular. I think it has the same issues that most small sensor digital cameras have and that's chiefly contrast. But for a 2MB camera phone it works. (Especially if you remember that "shutter" doesn't release until you remove your finger from the "button.") Being part of my "always with me" iPhone certainly has it qualify as the Best Camera on more than one occasion.

This is where software enters the picture. Like I said, the iPhone camera has it's issues and can use a little help. I think software like Best Camera and Adobe's Photoshop.com is much like the Lomography folks shooting with Lomos, Dianas and  Holgas. For the record: There's a taped up Holga gathering dusk in the equipment locker behind me.

Where was I? Right. The same way those analog equivalents embraced the inexpensively, plastic-lensed cameras and the random color shifts, light leaks and whatever else happened through processing, I see the tweaking of the soft, flat images off the iPhone as a related idea. And there's a certain irony to using all this technology to render images that remind me of family pictures taken with a 110mm camera.

The difference being that it's much quicker to get these images out—to share them. Before, with film, you had to make an effort. You had to really work to get an image out. Film or slides needed to be processed, then printed—or scanned. Then you could get to sharing them. The process itself encouraged editing. Required it.

With digital? It's on the photographer to really think about the editing process. Instead of simply uploading the contents of a card.

And we're back. . .

Got back on Thursday. Looks like the Wordpress iPhone application managed to eat a post instead of. . . well. . . posting it. Not sure where it went, but essentially it was saying we were coming back. And included the photo here (taken on the iPhone). I have to say that aside from that glitch, the iPhone was nothing short of fantastic when I had a signal or a good WiFi access.

Spent a good chunk of Friday, drinking coffee and doing a coarse edit on the shots from the trip. I've got a lot of work to do on getting this site together, but I'm thinking now it's  matter of getting work uploaded and using it on a regular basis. More to come.