Why I should always have my camera...

[a la izquierda]

and not just my crappy camera phone.

?1

[RC]

1. Yep. I have my good pocket camera in a belt clip case.

Mine is a Canon Power Shot S95. The case is for a Kodak something or other, that I got at Office Max or some such.

Anyway, you can claim that picture as a work of art. Just come up with a good title.

[earthbone]

2. I wore the buttons out on my D70

I carried mine around so much that the buttons on the back were worn off from rubbing against my belt.I have a D90 now but carry a pocket lumix now everywhere i go.

[sir pball]

3. I find my phone works rather well, actually

With the right postprocessing (I actually use a lot of the same tricks I first picked up in 1998, cleaning up my tiny blurry pixellated Kodak DC25 images) I get wonderful digital-display images and serviceable 5x7 prints, or artistically-retro shots like yours (love it!). I think about getting a pocketable P&S every now and then, but the only real feature I lack is zoom and if Henri Cartier-Bresson didn't need it, neither do I!

[Stevenmarc]

4. I do like

The upper left side of the shot, I don't know if better camera would have improved it but absence of that strong vertical component certainly would have.

But the "crappy camera phone" comment kinda irks me. I've seen some extraordinary work with mobile photography, hell I've curated 2 exhibitions of it and a third is in the works.

Here's a montage of one of the first juried iPhone shows from 2010.

[a la izquierda]

5. Oh,if I had an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy I would not complain.

But I don't. Not all camera phones are created equally, as I'm sure you know.

[Stevenmarc]

7. True

But that's why I went with that video since in 2010 even iPhone cameras were crappier, those shots were done with either an iPhone3, 3s or 4 that were 2, 3.2 or 5 megapixels respectively.

As I said I like the image, it has a bit of Edward Hopper DNA and the technical disadvantage of the phone ads to the shot, it's the hanging chord that I'm not really a fan of.

[hunter]

6. My favorite thing in photography is seeing what I can do with a crappy camera...

... or an old fashioned chemical process.

I'm the only one who has to like my work. I'm never going to make money as an artist or photographer.

Here's two I posted recently:






The first was taken with a toy digital camera I found in a thrift store.

The second photograph was made through the magic of chemistry...

I don't have a darkroom anymore, or a large format negative scanner. Something I'd like to see would be 120 film on a base that wasn't clear, but turned white with developing. It could be developed in a reversal process, or the developed negative could be placed on an ordinary flatbed scanner and reversed electronically. I also like the look of contact prints made with negatives on cyanotype paper.

What I do is not a "lomography" or "instagram" photography because I've been making photographs this way since I was a kid in the 'sixties. But I do appreciate people who pay too much for cheap plastic cameras or old Soviet style equipment because they help keep chemical photography alive.