Last week I was approached by a popular cellphone service provider who was expanding service into the San Juan Islands.  They found me through Instagram.  I don’t post much on there, but I do throw out enough random #hashtags to be discovered.

Well, I guess their service peoples who are putting up the towers aren’t delivering the most appealing images to the social media department, so they called me.  They are trying to get the word out and Instagram only works when there’s pretty pictures.

We agreed on a price and I had two days to deliver 15 images for them to choose 3 from.  Of those 3, I hand over all copyrights.  That means no photo credit on my end. But, I’m not worried about them going much further than Instagram, so its no big deal.  I wonder which three they will choose.

So with the right marketing angles, I think one could become a professional iPhoneographer.  The hashtag #iphoneographer has been used over 700,000 times on Instagram.  The coolest part is that we have a mini laptop worth of editing software, a word processor, and internet hotspot built right into these amazing little cameras that fit right in our pocket.  The travel photographers dream tool.  With so much of our news delivered over the web now, clients don’t even ask for the highest resolution version.  They need it already in a web-ready size.

One key to making a camera phone “snapshot” look like a pro shot is learning how to work with your given focal length.  Lets face it, its a REALLY wide angle.  And that means your background and/or foreground blurring (bokeh) is thrown out the window.  (Bokeh is the tell tell calling card of the pro.  It means big expensive lens to most people, but Nikon’s cheapest prime lens like the 35mm will get the job done for $80. Its been my best kept secret for eight years now.)  So, if your foreground AND your background both have to be in focus; they both better be interesting.

The second key to success is composition.  And example would be Instagraming.  Instagram is square, and you have to think square when you are shooting.  Circles fit in squares, ovals do not. Get it?   The viewers eye needs to bounce around in that box for a while without wandering off by some strange figment jutting out of the frame.

The third is light.  If the light isn’t awesome, I have a hard time pulling out my phone.  Light is the photographer’s paintbrush. Without it, we are a sailboat with no wind.  Our brains love dramatic scenes of lighted objects.  We also love anything high on the emotion scale.  Maybe thats what we are looking for when we pull out our phones.  Escaping from our dull boring lives for a moment.  So the phone needs to give us something that stimulates.  For me, it can be a monochromatic dreary rainy landscape and my pupils will dilate and give me a warmer fuzzier feeling than a happy sunny postcard shot of the same scene.  I’m weird like that, but its full of an EMOTION that I crave.  So good bold!  On one end of the spectrum or the other, but go big.  Your competing for attention against cute cat videos, and those are hard to top.

 

So why do I still shoot with my DSLR? Well, while pixel count may not be everything anymore, the size of a large sensor allows for flawless low light images without the use of a flash.  At a dark wedding reception, cell phones can’t hold a flame to my D750 with my 50mm 1.4.

 

Below are 43 images from my Sunday. I shot for an hour right after sunrise. And then at 3pm, we stopped by the Take It Or Leave It and the kids and I caught the ferry to Friday Harbor. Upon arriving, we had just 13 minutes to drive to Cattle Point Lighthouse to catch the last 60 seconds of sunset.  I imported all 89 images into Adobe Lightroom that evening and ended up keeping what you see below.  Note: Yes, I can use my phone apps such as VSCO to tweak my photos but Lightroom is faster for me and its easy to cut and paste my edits across multiple images for a cohesive “story.”

I started my work day in my front yard capturing some morning light on Mt. Baker.

It was a cold day, so most of these morning shots where taken right out of my car window…

I love the shot above.

 

 

Laura just informed me that I have a ‘thing’ for mailboxes.

 

 

Jake showing off how he went to the dump and left empty handed.  #prouddad

When I composed the above picture, I was seeing “square” I call it.  It was rectangle in my phone, but I had a vision.  Compositionally, it pleases me.

 

I have no idea who that couple is.  I was supposed to shoot some pics with unidentifiable people in them.

 

American Camp.  I love the painterly effect that only a crappy camera like a cellphone can produce.

 

Speaking of painterly; look at the light and emotion of the above image.

 

I noticed that the panorama feature of the iPhone created a stunningly high resolution image.

 

FIN.