So after months of debating whether or not I should get one, I recently decided to buy a smartphone. One of the uses for a smartphone is to use it as a cellphone. However, I actually didn’t buy a phone card for it until after I’d owned it for over a week. Another use of the smartphone is to be able to connect to the internet while you’re out and about. But I’ve only done that once in 2 weeks.  So, if I didn’t buy it for the phone, ad I didn’t buy it for the internet access, why did I buy a smartphone?

Well, I bought it to learn how to use a smartphone as a camera.

“Y” (photo taken with b&w effect applied in smartphone camera when the photo was taken)

Why, you ask? Let me explain.

For the past year I’ve been teaching hands-on photography workshops at the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institute (d.a.i.) here in Tübingen called Taking Better Photos with Any Camera. That’s my gimmick – err, talent — for teaching photography. I.e.,  I can teach anyone to get better results from their photography with any camera, anything from cell phones to fancy dSLRs. That’s what I say. But only once has anyone shown up to a workshop with a smartphone, and even that guy had another camera with him, too, so we talked about the smartphone only for a minute or two. I’ve read articles about doing photography with them, but never actually used one myself.

However, the d.a.i. has asked me to conduct a workshop for teenagers next month. They wanted to call it “Taking Better Selfies”, but I renamed it to “Beyond the Selfie: Taking Better Photos of Everything in Your World“.  Now, while the participants are asked to bring any kind of digital camera, with the title and its reference to “selfies” — the self-portraits which are taken these days with smart phones — the odds are good that the teens who sign up for the workshop will come with smartphones.  So, I decided I’d better figure out more about smartphone cameras before I have to teach that workshop.

Which meant, of course, I needed to buy a smartphone.

For the past two weeks I’ve been experimenting with various “apps”, the software that you add to your phone in order to use its camera. One thing that has been striking is that there’s a notion of setting the camera to apply special effects to the photo before you actually take it.  It’s kind of the opposite of my usual approach to photography, where I am taking a photo and then changing it later in the digital darkroom on the computer. Of course, I do often look at a scene but “see” a final image in my head. I just don’t usually get a chance to actually manipulate settings on a camera to take it in a final “edited” format like that. But that’s the kind of thing you can do on a smartphone if you want to. So, for the past two weeks I’ve been experimenting, trying to get comfortable using the smartphone camera with this approach.

For example, in the gallery below you can see some photos I took this morning.  I’ve been spotting a bird –  the same bird? – in a particular spot on a fence in the park every morning this week. Every day he’s flown away before I’ve had a chance to snap his picture, though.

So today I was prepared to try to follow the birdie to get my photo if I could. However,  even though he predictably flew away from his regular perch when I came upon him, he landed seconds later just a few feet further down the fence. Perhaps he thought his new position would help me capture his “best side”?

Anyway, I managed to get a couple of shots of him, applying a different special effect each time. The app I was using on the camera actually recorded 2 photos at a time: one original, plus  one with the special effect setting I had chosen, which the camera applied when I pressed the shutter button.  I’ve uploaded both versions so you see the difference.

I’ve also included in the gallery what I’ll call shadow self-portraits that I took of myself yesterday, which  capture a study of light, shape and shadow.  Think of those as going beyond the selfie. As it were. 😉

Anyway, see what you think.