Photography Topic: Inspiration Found!

Who knew? Remember how I was seeking photographic inspiration? As if the blooming gardens and the smiling face of my kid wasn’t enough to satisfy me, I was in a photographic funk. I contemplated direction. Put down the camera for a while? Take a road trip? I needed something to energize my work. Well, I found it.

I upgraded my cell phone recently to an iPhone. My plan was offering a deal and I thought it would be a nice thing to be able to use the GPS functions of a 3G kind of phone. Let me point out here that I use about 9 of the 500 minutes of my cell phone plan. My phone was off and stuffed into my purse for most of the time. I took it out to call my husband when I was going to run an errand or something. I am not one of those cell phone people. At all. I don’t text. I don’t walk around with my phone strapped to my ear. I am not one of those people. But …I found a list of the best apps for photographers and someone listed the Hipstamatic. I checked it out and made my first app purchase of $1.99. Over the weekend, I got a chance to try it out.



Now I can’t stop thinking about stuff I want to shoot with it.

Here’s the deal. It uses your phone’s camera (all 2MPs) and gives you some options in shooting with it. You can select different “lenses” and “film.” The lens choice makes the image tinted, bluish or brownish for example, giving the photograph an old fashioned look. The “film” gives the shot a frame, jagged and rough or rounded and aged like they just came out of grandma’s box of photos in the attic. The images are grainy and uneven. The details are purposefully lost and blurred.



It’s the most freeing photography find I’ve found in a long time.



Any one who is at all familiar with my photography knows that I love detail. I’m a sucker for the centers of flowers brushed with pollen. The curl of a leaf. The texture of the sand. Sunshine in the wisps of my daughter’s hair. I tend to shoot things that make you want to touch them. Detail. Nuance. Love all of that. All of those details.

It’s a – gulp – CELL PHONE CAMERA of all things! It’s got no ability to focus and no telephoto or wide angle options. It’s just so off that the images end up looking dreamlike and exaggerated. The framing and the tinting make you think not of fine art but of old pictures that you see from the fifties and sixties. My Dad has a box of slides that evoke this kind of feeling.





This one, well, there’s no distinct focus, and the lighting is off.

Normally, these shots would be discarded from the file as a mistake.

What kind of flower is this? Who cares?

A pair of flip flops on the deck? A chunk of the flag?

I’ve shot this water tower in Bangor a lot of times. It’s a local landmark. Look at the distortion!

 It’s awesome!

I know that I can probably do all of this in Photoshop, but who has that kind of time? I like to compose in camera and do very little to the image once created. I found that using this little gadget gave me the freedom to shoot differently, to be inspired by the little ordinary things.

So what have I learned here? I learned that sometimes you’ve got to look at things through a different lens. How things are framed and presented can profoundly affect how they are perceived. This goes for many things in life beyond photography.

I’d love to hear from any readers who have found something that makes a change in the way you’re shooting, even short term.

If you’re interested in getting the Hipstamatic app, go to the iTunes store and search the photography apps. For me it was worth the two bits just to shake me loose from the photography stagnation.