An early image from my phone project. It’s interesting what you find when you’re looking. The phone is a great camera, particularly since it’s the one I have with me the most and it’s already paid for.
I was raised in the days of film where every frame was precious. You only had 12 or 36 frames depending on your format and each time you pressed the shutter release it cost about a $1. And if you shot transparency, as I did, the costs were tripled because I would take a 3 shot exposure bracket.
In 2001, when the cost of the digital camera’s dropped with the intro of Canon’s D30 and Nikon’s D1, I eagerly jumped in with both feet. I was so eager that I sold my beloved Leica R8 kit, complete with 18mm through 180mm prime lenses and an R6.2 manual body, to fund the venture. I cried…. I jumped for joy…. I no longer have the D1x, made from the 2.7-megapixel D1 camera that Nikon had somehow figured out how split the pixel in half to make a 5.3mp camera, our current camera is pushing 50mp. We all jumped through a lot of hoops in those days to get near the holy grail of 6mp. Just to be clear, I’m still crying over give up my Leica R system… it was a dream to use.
Sorry, I do digress.
The advent of digital has introduced, as Seth Godin says, the age of free bowling. I have the phone, it is a sunk cost, it has a camera…. but how do you use the camera when you are used to each image having a cost and a habit of limiting what you take. The answer was to play and share, make a project of it. See something you like? Good!!! Go play… step in, step out, change the angle, re-crop… shoot shoot shoot.. then review and pick. Take the risk, sometimes you win sometimes you fail. Seth also says that the way he gets his best ideas is to come up with more bad ideas than anyone else. Now the hard part, share… and let go. Just as a physical print is the final version of the image so is sharing, it’s harder though because it’s here for the moment and then gone.
