One of the most enjoyable parts of my recent road trip to Colorado for some ill-fated snowboarding, was the drive. Yeah, that’s right. I love a good road trip: the reading, the napping, the snacking, and now, the picture-taking.
Just before we left, I read a post by Heather Armstong (dooce.com) on a recent trip that she and her husband had taken to Los Angeles, and had left all of their fancy cameras and filters at home (they are both rather talented amatuer photographers). The pictures they produced using just their Iphones BLEW MY MIND [see here].
Up till now, I’ve actually not been that impressed with the iPhone’s camera- pics tend to come out blurry or ill-lit. Frankly, its something that I’ve used to take pictures of weird stuff at Walgreens or pictures of my adorable dog.
BUT by downloading just two camera apps the Hipstamatic and the TiltShift Generator (same as Dooce) from the Apps store, I was able to take some awesome pictures on the way to Colorado, mostly through Kansas, which as we know is not typically a cool and interesting place to photograph.
Behold:
What made this such a neat experience for me was not just that the pictures look super rad and vintage-y, but that I felt like I fulfilled a long-held desire to be a ‘photographer’ rather than just a “picture taker”.
I remember finding an old camera of my mothers with a roll of film still in it- I was 12 or so. I read up on appatures and film exposure and spent the next few weeks, including a summer trip to my great-grandmother’s corn farm in Iowa carefully framing these amazing shots- red barn against a vivid blue sky! cornhusks on the grass! etc.-only to have the film tear when I attempted to wind it back into the canister, and thus expose the whole roll when I opened the back. I was crushed.
When I got married, I discovered that my husband actually was a photographer, or rather a better one than me, with better equipment and a better eye, so I gladly handed of any picture taking duties to him, confident that his photos would come out better than anything I could take.
Until now.
Apparently, its taken 15 years for the technology to catch up to my desire to take overexposed, vintage inspired, color-saturated pictures. These are the best pictures I’ve
taken in the last decade and it only took $2.99 worth of Apps and the world’s most sophisticated cell phone to help me achieve it.
Your site theme looks awsome. What template did you use ?
its called My Diario 1.0; it’s cute, yeah?