I haven’t posted recently because I’ve been doing a side project with the mobile phone camera available at ‘From the camera, not the hip‘
Foot tunnel (‘The Fudge Can’, Retro Camera Plus)
The not the hip part is important… apps like ‘Instagram’ for the iPhone with their pre-defined effects have saturated my twitter feed for many a moon now, and some of the photos are fabulous. Many of them however exist because they can. Gizmodo puts it better than I ever can in Facebook Will Kill Photo Filters for Everyone. The ‘hipster’ label associated with Instagram and similar phone apps is a tainted one, sneered at by many real photographers. With some justification.
Firstly, I don’t use an iPhone and therefore can’t use Instagram et al. I prefer Android phones (despite the OS belonging to yet another evil empire, ie Google, sigh) because I want a phone to do what I want it to do. I’m very comfortable with Linux (upon which Android, the phone’s OS, is based) and it is trivial (for me) to ‘root’ the phone, rip out the operating system and replace it with a customised ROM of my choice and a kernel for every occasion. I’ve used Morfic’s Trinity kernels, the monster T144 overclocked to 1.44GHz with a 240MHz bus/gpu (the Nexus’ cpu is clocked at 1GHz), the more conservative TUEV, underclocked to 0.88GHz with a 220MHz bus/gpu, and half a dozen others as the mood (or dead phone) takes me (currently Lucid Nexus 2.1 blue for stability).
What is the point of this? Because I can. As I said, I want the technology to do what I want, not what (for example) Steve Jobs thinks I want. That is why I don’t use an iPhone.
My phone of choice at the moment is the Nexus S.
Ditto with the software for the phone, known as ‘apps’. The Android app store is a glorious mess of good and bad, and as a grown-up I expect to be able to make the decision on whether or not to install a developer’s app based on my own appraisal, not have that decision made for me. Unlike the Apple app store which has famously banned apps such as the cartoon version Joyce’s Ulysses based on some puerile anxiety that the boobs on display are somehow pornographic. No thank you… The obscenity there is the censorship.
No apologies for the rant, and here is a picture for all control freak corporations:
The Dog’s Arse (‘Vignette’)
Back to the phone… I’ve been using three camera apps, Retro Camera Plus, Vignette and Little Photo (plus its plugin). All of these apps work fine on a stock Android phone, the above was just for context
The three have different approaches.
Least flexible is Retro Camera Plus which has (and I quote) “5 cameras, 5 sets of vintage vignetting, film scratch, black and white & cross processing effects for that off-the-hip analog look. Inspired by the Lomo, Holga, Polaroid, Diana, the toy cameras & Hipstamatic.” Each camera is lovingly recreated on the phone screen, right down to the crappy viewfinder experience common to them all. This is part of the fun but seems to be a point missed by many of the commenters in the app market who have obviously never used the real ones. Retro Camera Plus is the easiest to use because the only decisions are (a) which camera to use and (b) whether to shoot colour or black and white. Personally I love ‘The Fudge can’ in black & white. Turn off the frames though.
Blackheath (‘The Pinhole’, Retro Camera Plus)
Vignette and Little Photo (with its plugin) allow more complex interaction but work in different ways. Vignette is best with preselected effects and there are *a lot* of them. These can usefully be saved as shortcuts or added as favourite settings to be recovered later (side note, Vignette doesn’t like a too undervolted kernel). Little Photo encourages ‘post processing’ by allowing a huge range of effects to be added after the photo has been taken. They can be layered too for really complex results and it feels like photoshopping the photo, the finger is used as a brush with some of the filters.
The bottom line is that Vignette & Little Photo will let you take photos without that ‘processed’ hipster look of pre-defined effects that everybody else uses. The B&W settings in Retro Camera Plus are far enough away for me too (except perhaps the ‘scratches’ on ‘The Pinhole’. I also leave off the frames in Retro Camera Plus, they intrude in my opinion.
One of the aims of my project, ’From the camera, not the hip‘ has been to upload the photos within minutes of them having been taken, so in this respect Little Photo has been less than useful for mobile photography (ie it has a more ‘traditional’ workflow). Therefore I’ve mostly been using Retro Camera Plus and Vignette when on the move. As long as I have my glasses with me I can shunt them up to the Posterous site (using Superious) directly.
Shirt Mannequin, Deptford (‘Xolaroid’, Retro Camera)
In good light the phone’s camera can be surprisingly sharp (above). I’m amazed in fact! The mannequin was photographed through glass too.
Low light, it suffers like most phone cameras (below) – in other words it’s crap, unless murky sludge-like digital noise rocks your boat (half close your eyes and think of grain perhaps):
DEC VT100 plus Ironing Board (‘Vignette)
The DEC VT100 above is a working computer (terminal) although and should really belong in a museum. I hook it up to a Linux box as a dumb terminal and run something like ‘tail -f /var/log/messages’ from the commandline for some uber-geeky coolness. Lovely green characters on a black screen for all you Matrix freaks. The ironing board on the other hand also belongs in a museum but should be condemned.
So that is my take on the phone camera. I’m enjoying it immensely, not least because it is the camera I usually have with me most of the time. An important consideration. Another factor is the ubiquity of phone cameras. The Met and their acolytes seem to be camera-blind when it comes to phones.
by skinnyvoice
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RT @skinnyvoice: Mobile Photo Fun #photography #photoblog http://t.co/htpv0Rnj
Lovely photos. The DEC VT100 was always only a dumb terminal. I used one decades ago when I worked for digital; online with a slow modem. Built like a battleship.
Great project, I think the Fudge Can is my favourite Retro Camera mode too…
Instead of using apps to ‘recreate’ (badly and exaggeratedly) the
results from film cameras, why not use the original cameras? They’re cheap as chips, and authentic.
I do use the originals Peter (you’ve read the blog???) and I’d argue the point about the bad ‘recreation’. Both the Holga & the pinholes that I use can produce the same appalling results as their digi equivalents, but that is probably down to me. I think using their phone app equivalents just adds another option, at least in terms of immediacy, which is what I am looking for here. I always carry a phone. Usually I take out a toy camera for something specific. Not forgetting there is also a shitload of developing & post-processing required with the 120 film of the originals.
I should have mentioned that I also use the phone camera unadulterated too… Like I say, it is another option in a plurality of camera options. In the end it boils down to the operator not the camera anyway. If it works for you, fine. If not… that’s fine too