Another three of my best photos – iPhone edition

A lot of my best photos are taken with my Olympus DSLR while most of my photos are actually taken with my iPhone. As Chase Jarvis often says “the best camera is the one that’s with you” and given how good the camera has gotten in the iPhone 4 and 4S (and some Android phone’s too), it’s no wonder that I’m starting to get some shots I’m happy with from my iPhone. What really tipped me over the edge with “iPhonography” was Al Smith’s book EyePhone which I’ll review soon; it really showed me just how easy it was to take great photos with your phone if you went about it in the right way. My biggest take away, was that it’s important to have a different style with your phone camera – it is inferior to a SDLR in every major respect, however, it’s still good enough to take great pictures as long as you aren’t trying to take the same style of pictures as you’d take with a DSLR.

The first photo was taken a few weeks back, my car got a flat tyre as I was driving back from town with Eva. I seized the opportunity to try and take an interesting photo. Something that Al Humphreys had said about changing the angle you take a photograph at to make it more interesting stuck in my head so I got down really low and took this shot. Obviously, it didn’t initially look like this, I used Camera+ as both the camera and the first stage of editing and then used Snapseed to finish up. I’m really satisfied with how this picture turned out.

This picture of Eva was actually taken a few days before the one of the flat tyre, just after I read EyePhone. I really took the ‘different styles’ to an extreme and ramped up the surrealism. I really like how it turned out and I think the over-sharpness actually looks great. This is the photo that really made me understand how I could use my phone, as well as my DSLR, to take great, interesting pictures.

The final picture was taken on the same day as the surreal picture with Instagram and using the filter Inkwell. As cliched as Instagram is, it’s still possible to get some really nice photos with it and it is really great as a sharing tool. I really love how white the daisies look as well as how they totally fill the centre of the frame. This was another of those cases where I saw an opportunity for a photo that I wouldn’t have seen six months ago.