A couple more images from the recent Liverpool trip – these were reworked in Photoshop after I made an initial stab within the iPhone – a really bad idea: the screen is far too small and the light conditions are so variable that you just can’t get a true feel for what you are looking at. Talk about teaching old dog new tricks…this old dogs seems to have forgotten the old tricks he had learnt before.
Out and about working on the Playground of the Midlands project today and I have to say I captured some of the most uninteresting images I can think of. This maybe because I was working in areas where some of the largest and thereby plutocratic houses in the whole of Charnwood Borough are to be found. There wasn’t any sense of life or individuality other than that brought with money. As we walked the area there was one lone young boy kicking a football into a set of goals in garden of his house. He had no friends to play with, no doubt they were at the local private school in Loughborough, and so he just continued to kick the ball all alone amongst the vast wealth on display. For a moment I got a vision of hell which in some way describes the lifeless perfect world amongst the plutocrats.
More reflections on our journey through the North West and North Midlands.
Having just returned from a couple of days on the road I thought I would have a first stab at some of the images I captured. Not too shabby. I am using the viewfinder on my Canon more and more and it is so long since I have used a viewfinder camera I have forgotten the golden rule – ensure that you have taken the lens cap off!
No doubt over the coming days I may well find one or two further images that I captured on our travels.
Just over a month ago I was bemoaning the fact that I was stranded in the creative doldrums. If a week is a long time in politics clearly a month is an eternity creating stuff. Other people can judge whether I have made anything interesting …I know I have and for me that is all that matters.
Having sat through the latest cult fest from Apple about how they have made the best camera in the world (I paraphrase/exaggerate but not by much) I took my iPhone for a bit of a workout at Liverpool yesterday and I learnt a very good lesson. The iPhone camera is great but you really have to remember that it is little more than an instamatic camera. You can capture really great images but at the same time it is hugely limited. What it can do, and yesterday I was guilty of this, is to make you lazy and assume that the camera is so much better than it really is. You then get back home and start to work on the image and realise that many a great image was spoilt by the photographer forgetting to be a photographer and thinking that the camera will pick up the pieces. The iPhone does pick up a lot of the pieces dropped by the photographer but there are limits – something that Apple neglect to mention.
I suspect many people who might read this will think it is so last century to post produce the image outside of the iPhone, after all there are so many apps out there that will help you make some great images. This is true up to a point and that point where the camera doesn’t live up to the hype or where you want to view the image on something more than an iPhone or in Facebook.
Don’t get me wrong the iPhone SE is a great camera and I love it to bits. I have made some great images over year using a variety of iPhones and the images above are not bad in anyway it is just when you start to work on the resultant images you realise that they can’t take the heavy lifting that a RAW fill can. The images, after all, are JPEGS which is one of the worst file formats for storing image data (god bless Shannon’s entropy) . As a photographer you must bare this in mind when using the iPhone, yesterday I didn’t and it came back to bit me on the bum just a little.
The more I use the Apple Pencil the more I realise the potential for me to release creative ideas. I make formal digital portraits with my Wacom and Photoshop but these don’t have the freedom of the Apple Pencil and Procreate. Funny how things work out isn’t it?
One of the advantages of not feeling 100% is that it gave me chance just to sit back and makes some drawings and paintings.
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