7/52-30 Fold(s)

I downloaded VSCOcam in early July, but hadn’t taken it for a proper test yet: one of those (many) impulse camera app purchases/downloads that I only rarely regret, as most are worth the free or $0.99 cost. I read that it was nice, simple, and powerful, and thought it might be a fun addition to my app arsenal, so I hadn’t put it in a folder, and instead, I made room for it on the photo app screen. (If I recall, it replaced the excellent Mextures app, which should really come out of the folder where it might have a chance of seeing some use…) I was all set to use it, I just hadn’t.

Then, maybe a week after I downloaded it, I read the 50 Things I Have Learned about Mobile Photography (and iPhone Photography) by Misho Baranovic (instagram @mishobaranovic) on the procamera blog. #35 stuck with me in ways others didn’t. Not that many of the others weren’t useful, it’s just that #35 was different somehow.

So fast-forward a couple of weeks to last Monday evening. I was chilling on the sofa, watching a lecture on Surah Fatiha, if I recall, and playing with the phone (gogo multitasking), when I spotted the app icon and thought “VSCO Cam is the new Hipstamatic.”

The photo above was the result, and it set off the week.

This isn’t a review of VSCOcam, really, and it isn’t a replacement for Hipstamatic, not in my world anyway. But it is a nice addition to the app arsenal, what with it’s Free price and nice collection of filters (and if you like the 5 or so free ones that come with the app, go ahead and drop the $6.00 to get the others: you likely won’t be disappointed, but you might be a bit overwhelmed (and the $5.99 for all the filter packs is on for a limited time… not sure how limited: it was limited on July 5 when I first looked at the app, and I bought the pack on July 20-somethingth, and it was still limited then, and it’s still limited as of this morning… maybe it’s going to go away in early August? Who knows.)). Plus, its camera module has separate focus and exposure controls, plus a white balance lock, and its editing screens allow control over exposure, white balance, contrast, rotate, and crop (and a host of others I found just now by scrolling to the right… sheesh… even more powerful than I thought).

Anyway. Everything was shot with the iPhone 5 via VSCOcam, and edited and processed in VSCOcam. Much of the EXIF is in the lightbox, but the preset filters are sadly missing. Perhaps they’ll appear in an update sometime. For reference, here are the filters I used, in order… S2, B4, C3, S6, F2, P4, F2… interesting that I used that F2 twice… wish I’d seen that before, I might’ve switched it up some.

You can find VSCOcam in the App Store. It’s worth the Free (and the extra filters are a nice addition, if a bit overwhelming at first, and you can probably get similar results out of the host of editing settings, and $6.00 isn’t nothing in the way that $0.99 is…).

Also: the title of this week’s 7/52 comes from a mis-remembered discussion of a portion of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque that we read in Performance Theory class… something about folding, enfolding, unfolding and identity… I don’t recall all the specifics, but after looking at that chapter again, I sorta want to read the whole book…

7/52-28 Skies, Dive, Dried

First off, let me just apologize for the complete lack of a coherent theme, largely poor composition, and general lack of subject (beyond “pretty”). No excuses.

Whew. Busy week. 10 and 11 hour meetings at work had me going in late and coming home later, which made for different lighting conditions than I’m used to seeing on my way to and from work. GoGo.

Seems there are some advantages to working a more average schedule after all…

So I shot this week with the LX7, recently returned from the UK, where it visited the Isle of Skye and various points in the southwest of England. Don’t worry: I didn’t go off to UK and not post any pictures; the camera was on loan to a coworker.

EXIF, if any is in existence, should be in the lightbox, and I did minimal post work on most of the pics. I did try out the radial filter in Lightroom 5 (between that and decent perspective correction, definitely worth the upgrade fee…) on one of the pics: the treatment is perhaps a bit heavy-handed, but it was my first time…

7/52-27 phoning it in

aka one camera (app) one lens(/film filter) #2

It was a busy, stressful, and wildly exciting week for me, and I had no idea what I wanted to shoot, until I saw this picture from Instagram user @blumenkraft, and off I went!

Much thanks to Jochen Spalding for this hipstarecipe, without which you’d likely be viewing a different sort of phoned in post.

Should I tell you about the stress and excitement? Hummm I think I’ll wait. This deserves a post of its own and not just an aside in 7/52…

Not much else to say on this. Everything was shot with the iPhone 5 and Hipstamatic app, using the John S lens and Robusta film. There’s a bonus pic, trying out the software flash… I haven’t done much with this, but I think there are some possibilities.

It was tough finding appropriate subjects for this treatment: landscapes were either too contrasty or too saturated (due probably to the slight green cast from the John S lens), but I think I got a few shots of interest out of the apartment and the cubby at work. All in all, the 7/52 was fun, and provided a few brief respites from the stress and excitement, and for many uses, I’m more convinced than ever that a phone makes a suitable artistic device, and that (depending on purpose and intent) one might not need a big camera.

There are cases, of course, where a big camera is absolutely needed: when you need or want to zoom in or out and can’t do so with your feet; when you want the telephoto compression or bokeh that only a larger-sensor camera can provide; when you need high detail for product shots or for printing BIG (in which case, you should probably be shooting medium format). Or perhaps you just want to show off…

For my own purposes, the phone works just fine for anything from about 6 inches to 15 feet or so, with some uses for landscapes, and limited (read: artistic) uses for close-up stuff. If I want macro? Big camera. Bokeh? Big camera. Proper zoom lenses? Big camera. Anything other than 28-35mm (the iPhone 5 field of view is roughly equivalent to a 33mm lens on a full frame camera).

Anyway, this is a 7/52 post, not a screed for or against any image capturing device. If you like to shoot, grab whatever you have and make some pictures!