Because the iPhone allows all of us to be amazing photographers now. And something needs to happen about that.
This feeling has been eating away at me for some time now because I feel like a cheat when I shoot something amazing with my phone. Take my last two shots, which I’m very proud of. They cause me a lot of self loathing. Look at how amazing my photo of the Urban Lights sculpture at LACMA is. It’s a total lie. I understand framing, I understand the rule of thirds. I don’t understand how to work with light, especially not dusk, which was when this photo was taken. My Photoshop skills are rudimentary. Yet I created an Amazing Photograph because my phone has Lo-Mob on it. Fuck you, me.
My ex-girlfriend and one of my best friends are Hipstamatic addicts. Hipstamaddicts. I refused to download Hipstamatic because I didn’t want to gaffle their style. I have my own style. I adjust some levels in Photogene, crop the image, run it through one of a handful of CameraBag or Lo-Mob filters, then use TiltShiftGen not to make a tilt-shift image but because a little bit of blur goes a long way, and because TiltShiftGen has a killer vignetting tool. But this is a farce. It’s like saying I’m a cook because I mix and match TV dinners. It’s retarded to think I have a photographic style in iPhone photography. I hope the ghost of Walker Evans punches me in the face.
Eric’s right. The key here is that taking pictures doesn’t make you a photographer. Software makes this line an easy one to blur.
[via Gizmodo]