Andy Adams has started a new creative outlet. He is using Substack to broadcast news and information. I too am trying to shift my creative energies so have eagerly signed up.
So I’m using Substack to share community news, recommend books, show some pictures, and talk about the artists I admire. Sound good? Sign up here to get on the list.
About a year ago, an app surfaced that was attempting to usurp Instagram. It was using a paid model from the get go making it one of the more reasonable options. I was lucky to grab an account. A year later things are still a bit quiet in there, but that’s not a bad thing really. Some other tweaks that were recently brought to my attention are that there is now a web interface. The other changes have been, the ability to simply “appreciate” a photo, a bit like a like on Facebook or Instagram. Lastly they now have a broad range of categories to add your photo to to help its get found.
So its going to be another 12 months for me on this platform as yet again Instagram changed how it presents itself.
There is another free service called pixelated.social, I of course have an account there as well [s2art]
The iphone turned 15 recently, it has had a profound impact on my practice as an artist, but my experience clearly differs from many photojournalists use of the device.
Two articles dropped in my inbox recently, that demonstrate this. One from the AP News the other The Guardian. Mostly written by photojournalists, they seem either to venerate or denigrate this device. There is some shade of nuance between each extremes, to be fair. Many talk about using the viewfinder as a kind of extension to their seeing. Clearly none have worked with a medium format film camera, or large format film camera which requires the user to step back and take in the whole scene or think about a back to front and or upside down view on ground glass. In the 1950s these were common cameras for the press of the day. The iPhone actually mimics the ground glass of a 5×4 monorail or studio camera in terms of physically moving your face away from the device to compose the picture. This seems to have escaped most of the interviewees in both articles.
A blurred image of a moving car only made possible by a smartphone, in this case an iPhone, caused by shutter roll
This then raises some issues about a professional versus an amateur. I myself have never sold or made an image for a client for money. Yet I have used film cameras of many types and sizes for more than 30 years. I have been an educator specialising in photography in all its forms since 1993. Taking the time to consider what is in the frame forms a large part of what I do all the time, regardless of camera used.
Also, I use a third party app to make pictures with my iPhone, this alone has impacted on my picture making experiences, with this device. Yet I sense none of the professionals in the articles think this way? This third party app allows me to capture RAW DNG files and process them as I would any other digital capture.
In the early days of phone cameras prior to the iPhone my own experience with phone cameras, was one of being highly experimental . I had no preconceived ideas about what the device could achieve and no expectation that it would replicate the real world in any way shape or form. As I experienced it. So why should a device with better optics and more resolution, interchangeable lenses amongst other things ever be expected to do this?
These days, having a camera in my pocket at all times is both liberating and exciting. As of todays date I have over 147 thousand iPhone images alone. Are they all earth shattering works of art? No! Is it possible to look back over this archive draw conclusions about what the images can “say”. Yes. The pandemic alone has prompted me to consider photo opportunities themselves. Some may see some light at a future date. Could I have done this without an iPhone? No. Would I ever have contemplated it? No.
In my never ending pursuit to escape the clutches of Adobe’s leasing model, I’m always on the lookout for alternative software to manage organise and process my digital files. This last few months I have been working exclusively without any Adobe products. Lightroom was my go to tool until I resurrected Aperture by Apple on an old Desktop. Now I’m using 2 apps to do all the heavy lifting.
Neofinder’s interface, is like Adobe’s Bridge, but creates a catalogue file or files,
NeoFinder is the first. It is now my digital asset tool of choice. Finding and using this software has potentially saved me from buying a new desktop computer. The software is stable, fast and flexible. If it had an ability to “ingest files” and process them as raw then I’m set. As Neofinder does not, my workflow consists of using Apple’s Image Capture.app to ingest files, Neofinder to rate, sort and organise, and Affinity Photo to process the raw files.
Affinty Photo’s raw processor interface. It is a powerful digital editing tool with a similar feature set to Adobe’s Photoshop with out the ongoing lease costs.
