Just Make Art

Moody, dreamy — I like how Plastic Bullet sees the world!

Ever since first get­ting an iPhone a cou­ple of years ago, I have had a rocky rela­tion­ship with the built-in cam­era. The pho­tos I took were just hor­ri­ble: blurry, unin­spired messes that irri­tated me. For the most part, I ignored it, despite a few exper­i­ments with pho­tog­ra­phy apps and the com­pul­sive kitty pic­tures. My feel­ing was that I’d rather lug around my Nikon dSLR — fairly out­dated at five years old — than try to do any­thing mean­ing­ful with my iPhone camera.

But recently, I’ve been want­ing to change my atti­tude. I now have an iPhone 4, which has a bet­ter cam­era and, in decent light­ing con­di­tions, it doesn’t embar­rass me as much as it used to. More impor­tantly, I’m want­ing to include more pho­tog­ra­phy in my art work, and I have to be hon­est: I’m not going to carry my Nikon every­where I go. I need some­thing small and fun. I’m also ready to let go of the snob­bery I carry from my pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher days, when toy cam­eras seemed like a way to cover up bad photo skills. Let’s be real — I’m not try­ing to doc­u­ment real­ity. I want to be creative.

Toward that end, I signed up for LK Ludwig’s iphone pho­tog­ra­phy class, The Camera in Your Pocket. Because I signed up on a hol­i­day week­end, I was aware that I wouldn’t get the class infor­ma­tion for sev­eral days. But know­ing that doesn’t stop my brain from churn­ing, so I spent a cou­ple of days on a mad ques­tion to find out every­thing I could about the lat­est and great­est iPhone pho­tog­ra­phy apps. 72 hours later, I have a lot to share! Continue read­ing “Creative Photography for iPhone Users”