Putting the Art in SmART Phone Photography
One thing I’ve learned about iPhoneography, or Smart Phone Art, is that it is more about telling a story, or conveying a mood, than it is about the image itself. At least it is for me. Here are some recent iPhone images. They are composites. All the pieces were taken with an iPhone and processed on an iPad using various apps.
Wonderland Lost
I generally don’t know where an iPhone photograph is going when I start working on processing it. The story sort of comes to me along the way. In this case, I began to think about how parents in my generation tend to coddle their children and attempt to build a perfectly safe, impossible to fail world where nothing ever goes wrong. As a result, many young adults have to suffer a rude awakening when they realize that the real world is not the same one they grew up in. Hence the title, “Wonderland Lost.”
Wonderland Lost by Richard Lewis 2014 – Apps Used: Snapseed, Leonardo, DistressedFX, Monokrome, Superimposer
I Often Dream Of Flying
The young lady in this photograph is a close friend’s granddaughter. She is a magical child full of life and wonder. She is also saddled with the reality that her mother suffers from a serious, debilitating illness. Although she and her family receive so much love and support, I wonder if, as she grows up and becomes aware of the situation life has given her, she will dream of a very different world.
I Often Dream Of Flying by Richard Lewis 2014 – Apps Used: Snapseed, DistressedFX, Leonardo
Our Trip To Alaska Was Full Of Ghosts And Dancing Children
Regular followers of my blog have seen my landscape photos of Alaska’s Inside Passage. Within Alaska’s stunning landscape is a rich and tragic history of the loss of the native Indian culture. In modern Alaska there are many young people attempting to build a future in this rich and diverse landscape. Their youthful energy provides an interesting juxtaposition with the ghosts of the past. This image is different from my Alaskan landscapes, but tells a story that those photographs cannot.
Our Trip To Alaska Was Full Of Ghosts And Dancing Children by Richard Lewis 2014 – Apps Used: Snapseed, Leonardo
The more I use the iPhone’s camera, the more I understand how it is a vehicle to look at photography in a completely different way. It almost forces a different attitude and vision. For me, iPhoneography is a process where I collect images, sometimes randomly, and use them to solve a puzzle that doesn’t become obvious like until I start to put it together.
How I Did It – To be honest, I’m not sure. This form of art is still a struggle for me and about 80% of what I start to do ends up not going anywhere. I do have a work flow and a process that I’m refining which will be the subject of a future post.
Enjoy
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Great artwork!
Thank you
These are marvelous!
Thanks. A bit different from what I normally do with a DSLR and fancy lenses. I’m not sure how these will go over.
Hello Rich, this is a welocome & refreshing look at photography, and something I like to see in the medium with it’s boundless ideas and execution. The bulk of your work is stunning but, seeing you step out and into this style is exciting to me. I myself have changed directions sort of as I look to abstracts, found objects, old & rusted articles that time took over, and the beauty of decay among plants & flowers. Perhaps the series will be called “Overlooked or Disregarded Beauty”. Anyway this approach allows me to get up and personal to try and make something happen in a controlled area. Not that I have any disdain for the classical/salon school of photography just that it’s been overdone in many repects so, I’m taking a little detour.
I love your comments about the photo’s; I have two grown daughters and a beautiful grandaughter (Finley) all very different from each other and I often think about how they move through and will move through this world. I’m a baby boomer and my reality is a little different than the youth of today.
Anyway thanks for sharing and I look forward to more of your iPoneography!
Hi Bob – Thanks for your comments, especially your thoughts on expanding ones artistic horizons. I feel that all my work improves the more I diversify. If anything it keeps things interesting although I still find that the iPhone is still the most frustrating and fulfilling of these diversifications.
I’d be interested in seeing more of your work with the “Overlooked and Disregarded Beauty”. I started a project photographing old and abandoned building, particularly farms and buildings in the rural landscape. I call this project “Abandonment”. It would be good to compare images.
We baby boomers grew up in a different world than our children. Jobs are harder to find and living is just so much more complicated. One can only hope we prepared our kids to find their way in it.
WOW!!! We are seeing a whole new side of Rich here. I like it. Very creative and thoughtful images and words.
Thanks Denise. I’m finding that my work with the iPhone is a whole new experience. Images, at least for me, seem to require more meaning. It is like you create the image from captured photographs, or go out and capture pieces to create an image you have in your mind. Weird stuff, but very cathartic.
Truly amazing Rich! I didn’t now this art style was possible! You have opened my mind to many things. I can see the potential of this style to tell stories without inadequate words and carrying heavy equipment. I want more!
Season, this is truly a different way to tell stories and it is what I’m really loving about iPhoneography. With landscapes the story is pretty much the same although I still don’t mind telling it over and over again. With this, experiences, conversations, imagination and impressions can come to life in a completely different way.
…and I’m now going to sign up for your iPhoneography workshop in February.
I really look forward to seeing you there. It will be fun stuff.
Nice iPhoneography. I especially like “Wonderland Lost”. Before I started getting better with my dslr I was doing mostly iPhone pics. I think I was a lot more creative with that. But I thought it was an easy way to turn a crappy picture into something interesting using apps to post on instagram. It was fun, but I think I have trouble being “creative” with my dslr. I focus more on nature and birds.
Thanks Fred for definition of iPhoneography. It is the best one I’ve heard so far. It actually is turning crappy photographs (they are crappy when you compared to a good DSLR) into something creative. I think you are experiencing the same thing I am, just in the opposite direction. I started with the DSLR and love photographing the landscape but started to wanted more. I used the iPhone for snap shots, and began to see it is an avenue to be creative in a very different way. It’s not that photographing birds and nature is a bad thing, you have gotten really good at it and I really enjoy your work. Still, as artists, we need to be open to the idea of evolving in the ways we express our artistic vision.
I saw a demo today at Kelbyone’s Lightroom seminar of Topaz software. It is really cool and I was tempted to buy it. I was very impressed with the noise reduction technology that it offers. It also does a lot of the things that the apps do for iPhoneography. Like making your photo look like paint strokes or pencil drawings.
Fred, I use Topaz software extensively for my big camera work. I’m not crazy about using it for iPhone work. The new software they offer, Impression, is outstanding and I highly recommend buying it to play with. I’m finding that using it more subtly is helpful to my vision of a finished images, however, it is fun to create very painterly images too.
I echo Denise’s big Wow, Rich. You have an artists’s soul, and the images shown are moving. Also nice to see some original work from other than Topaz Impression (not knocking it; like it). I have to note, however, that what you’ve done is not restricted to an iPhone; it can be done (perhaps with better image quality) with a DSLR or a quality point-and-shoot.
Thanks Ralph, I like Impression too but don’t see making paintings out of photographs with it. I’m figuring out how to deploy it more subtly. Part of the iPhone’s intrigue is making images work with such low resolution. The apps specifically designed for this type of photograph work well with this limitation and actually work better than Photoshop. After they are done, it easy to push the finished image to a size like 12×18 and larger. I’ve seen iPhone prints as big as 20×30 and they are surprisingly clean, however, the imperfections like jpeg artifacts are usually worked into the texture of the image.