Back and White iPhoneography | It’s The Moment That Matters
© 2011 Wazari Wazir | My Family Having Breakfast | Photograph With iPhone | iPhoneography
When Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple unveiled the iPhone on January 2007 I’ve always dreaming of having one. I’ve to admit that I was Apple fan but to to the extend of being fanatic. My first computer is MacBook Pro and my second computer also MacBook Pro and I will always choose Mac computer if I need to get another computer in case of my Laptop broke beyond repair or too expensive to fix it.
I wish I can get my hand on Apple iPhone on that time, I wish I’ve the money to get one but at that time it was driven more by desire to have one than a necessity. Most of the times I use my mobile phone just to make and receive calls and for SMS or short message service, I really don’t need all the bells and whistle that came along with iPhone and there were thousand of iPhone apps on the Apple Store, some are free and some charge just a minimal fee.
To cut the story short, finally I get my iPhone, I know that there are many mobile phone out there that can do what iPhone can do to the certain extend but like I wrote previously, I like Apple product and hence I choose the iPhone. My cheap mobile phone just can’t store so many information, it was difficult to add email address to it and quite difficult to type and as you know I’m selling eBook online and with iPhone I can manage my business better and now I can send the files while I was on the moves, my current mobile phone just can’t do that, it was cheap and I can’t browse the internet with it. It was very basic mobile phone.
Among other things that attract me to this current iPhone 4 is that the quality of the photograph taken with iPhone built n camera quite outstanding for such a small device. Those two pictures above were taken with iPhone 4 camera, on the very top one where my son look directly at me is original file taken from iPhone 4, I just cropped it square and it was edited inside the iPhone with Vint B&W apps. Second photograph were also taken with iPhone but it was edited in Photoshop.
iPhone is just a tool, to get a better picture with it, we must know some basic Photography especially about exposure, lighting and composition. We cannot control all the setting in the iPhone manually but if we know their limitation, we can make full use of it. I know that camera phone is not good at High ISO, meaning that if we took a picture indoor where the environment is a little bit dark, dimly lit lighting, the result won’t be good if we expect good quality but if we just wanted a picture as a memory, then the quality of the photograph is not that important, let say that you were in the bookstore and decided that you like certain books and does not want to bought it at that moment, you can just snap the picture of the books and decide later wether you want to buy it or not, it is like a visual diary where you can record your daily life visually.
Sometimes all we want is just a piece of a memory in pictures, sometimes all we want is to share a picture about our whereabouts with friends and family on the fly. It’s about connecting our life with people, sharing our daily life with the people especially with those who are close to us. Some people decide to keep their private life as a private and that’s is a personal choice. I will decide what I will share and what not to share, and definitely I’m not going to share about personal life hourly.
Sometimes using a DSLR is quite cumbersome, like the picture above where my family were having a breakfast at one of the “warung” at shopping mall. Idid bring a DSLR with me but decide not to use it because I don’t want to get people attention. So instead using a DSLR, I decide to use iPhone camera. I know in the first hand that I’m not going to print this picture BIG Wall size, maybe 8×10 inch will do and the files from iPhone is big enough for that size.
Great moment can be captured with any camera as long as it can take a picture but the quality of the digital files is vary from one camera to another. I like the wide angle factor of the iPhone, it is suitable for a photograph of a people and it’s surroundings and I’ve seen quite a lot of street photographers using iPhone for their work, it is small and does not warrant people attention on the street so much compared to big bulky DSLR size camera. I was inspired by Street Photographer Sion Fullana and he has done quite few exhibitions with his iPhone photographs.
A great moment can easily be captured if the camera is always in your hand or in your pocket instead of inside your camera bag, and I don’t think we carry our DSLR every time we went out, it was big and too heavy to carry it from day until night but a mobile phone always travel with us together, always with us, always ever ready to captured great moment on the fly.
Great picture is a great picture and great moment is a great moment, it doesn’t really matter with what camera you captured it, have you seen any of Henri Cartier-Bresson work lately? What is so special about his photograph? I believe it is the moment tat matters and not the quality of Super Giga pixels but then again DSLR has its place and iPhone camera has its place, if I want a quality photograph in term of digital image quality, I will always go for DSLR.
