I paid my dues to learn photography. I consider myself both self-taught and formally educated in the art and science of picture-taking and picture-making.
Oddly, even sadly, for the better part of my photography career, I confused complication and complexity with value and worth.
In other words, I falsely reasoned, that if the process or devices I used, to created my photographs, were intricate and involved, then so wouldn’t be their significance and magnificence to viewers.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Photographs, by most, are hardly ever judged by critical analysis of their level of difficulty to produce.
They are primarily and mostly judged on their emotional and aesthetic merits. Period. Click.
We live in an age where photography is appreciated, valued, and esteemed, not so much by the devices it was created on but by its messages and communication values.
In internet-speak, content trumps craft. What a picture says is far more important than how it was created.
Life is complicated. iPhone photography doesn’t need to be.
The more I work with my iPhone cameras, the more I fall in love with their ease of use, simplicity, convenience.
I feel, at some level, with iPhone cameras in hand, I’m coming full circle back to what brought me to photography in the first place-a desire to create and express art, without all the accompanying technical thrills and tingles.
Don’t misunderstand, for a minute, what I’m saying here. iPhone cameras, while seemingly simple and effortless, are incredibly powerful and robust.
It’s just that most of this power lives, seamlessly, under the hood, out of plain sight and view.
So you can finally do, what you were born to do- unceremoniously create, without technical flair and fanfare, the best photos of your life, with the world’s most popular cameras.
You press the button, Apple does the rest? Sound eerily familiar? Kodak Brownie?
Big cameras are devices with lots of hardware and a little bit of software.
Smartphone cameras are devices with a little bit of hardware and a lot of software.
It is exactly this software, working for you, behind-the-scenes, smoothly and continuously, that makes the iPhone camera amazingly and astonishingly herculean and substantial.
Click,
Jack
