May 2013
5 posts
6 tags
Oggl goes to Ostend
Oggl seems to be monopolising my blog lately and today’s blog is about the day I discovered it, when I was in Ostend last Saturday. You might remember a blog I did a while back when I wrote how stupidly overjoyed I was to be invited as a blogger on a trip to visit Ostend (all expenses paid!) by the lovely people at the Ostend tourist board. They had just launched a tour about the fascinating...
4 tags
The weird and disappointing thing about Oggl
As we take a closer look (quite literally) at Oggl, we discover some weird and disappointing things. In my blog yesterday I initially said that the pics seemed to be saving on my camera roll at full res. My good friend Brad Puet at Juxt questioned this and when I tried to find a picture that I’d published to Oggl and which I thought I had on my camera roll, I realised I couldn’t find...
3 tags
Oggl: another assault on Fortress Instagram
It all happened so quickly. Well, the acceptance of my expression of interest in joining Hipstamatic’s new photo-sharing app, Oggl, did. Of course, the actual launch of the platform was about 2 years late. The mobile world would have been very different if Hipstamatic had got there first. It seems only yesterday I was saying the same thing about the new Flickr mobile app.
So what do we...
6 tags
Is it just the robots that use tags on Instagram?
Surely real people will stop using tags on Instagram soon. Do people actually still use tags even? Who actually sits down and says to themselves: I’m going to have a look through the #iphoneart stream and see what wonderful creations have been posted up on Instagram recently? Well this muppet just did. What did I find? I found a hairy chested man in a baseball cap, a very small tortoise in...
3 tags
Hipstamatic sunglasses
Google have been talking about bringing out glasses that promise you a ticker feed of stock prices from New York in the left-side of your peripheral vision. Oh yipee. Much better would be if Hipstamatic brought out glasses that replicated some of their fantastic filters. See such a hipper world world through a Jimmy + Dream Canvas combo! Go back in time with the B-type + Tinto combo! You may be...
April 2013
10 posts
5 tags
The man who doesn't know what Instagram is
William Eggleston has no idea what (or who) Instagram is. He revealed this and a very limited number of other things in a recent interview with an illustrious panel of photographic luminaries published in The Independent.
If you’re a fan of Eggleston’s work you might also be the sort of person who puts on one of Schoenburg’s records and has a jig around the kitchen. Or are...
6 tags
Let the kids have the kameraz!
I’d almost forgotten about the app Action Shot. The easiest way to explain what it does is to look at the photo shown here.
You get the idea? I remembered it the other day because I was invited by Sport England to take some photos of one of their Sportivate initiatives, a group of Free Runners (a sport also known as Parcourt, or Parkour in its cooler version) and I thought it would...
6 tags
Become a filter designer
I recently did a photo shoot for Sport England. I took about 150 photos and narrowed my final selection down to around 30. Then I wanted to app them. Yes, all of them. As we’ve established many times before, apps were put on this earth to be used and the iphone camera takes pretty dull photos. So I wanted to app these photos. But I’d also had quite a hard day and I wanted to go home....
What's the story with Backspaces?
I’ve been going to support my team Luton Town on and off for many years. Last week was the last home match of the season. It had been a terrible season. We’re in the fifth tier of the English league system but used to play in the very top league against Manchester United and Chelsea. So whenever the press talk about Luton, the narrative is that of a club that has fallen hard times,...
Jowls like a clean-shaven gerbil
I’m going on a diet. Spring has sprung and summer is on its way and I’ve got a couple of new tee shirts with some particularly funny things on them that I’d like to wear in the summer festivals without having to hold my breath the whole time. In the iphoneography world, if you don’t like the way you look, there’s an app for it. In fact, there are quite a few. In my...
3 tags
I owe you one Instagram
I recently read an article by Charlie Sorrel recognising the contribution that Instagram had made to his own photography. I too must pay homage and give thanks. About a year ago, I became a professional photographer and I honestly don’t think I would have done it without Instagram.
Over the last two and half years of my Instagramming I think I’ve honed my photographic skills and...
Follow me follow you
There’s no easy way to say this. If you start following me on Instagram, I won’t necessarily follow you back. According to Statigram, my latest weekly follower balance is minus 9. I look through the long list of people who unfollowed me and can only say sorry @spacecabbage, apologies @puddlegram and what can I say @instagetpopular (you didn’t). And I can only suspect that a lot...
3 tags
Are you self-obsessed?
Are you a bit self-obsessed? Well, like my Mum always used to say if I said “very unique”, I’m not sure you can be “a bit” self-obsessed. But let’s go with it. And do you take photos? If your answers are yes and yes, you’ve probably taken a “selfie”. Or in highfalutin parlance, a self-portrait. Or in simple terms, a picture of yourself. With...
Where is Instagram now?
I’m putting the final touches to my advanced iphoneography group (AiG) workshop, which starts next Monday. Most of the students attended one of my introductory courses which were launched in February 2012, which I’m still running, now with the British Journal of Photography. When I started the course, we used Instagram as a photo sharing app. This time, we’ll be using Flickr. Why...
Brains and robots
It’s funny how our brains retain little snippets of information or opinions as we trawl from Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to Bckflip, but then we can’t remember where we heard them. Which is a roundabout way of me saying that I read something interesting that I’m going to tell you but that I’m not a good enough journalist (well I’m not a journalist full stop) to...
March 2013
8 posts
It's better by train
I took my wife out for a driving lesson one late Sunday afternoon a while back. As we were doing a three-point turn on a deserted Ealing Common, she put her foot on the wrong pedal (as an automatic car, it was a 50-50 call) and drove the car into a tree. It was a write-off. Though I didn’t mind too much. “I’ll be dining off this one for years”, I laughed (I didn’t...
Get some perspective
Just this week my friend and iphoneographic omnipresent Misho Baranovic launched an app that allows you to straighten the lines in a photo. Imagine you’re on the pavement and you’re looking up taking a photo of a building. In the photo, the sides of the building aren’t parallel with the frame of the photo, they slope inwards as they go up. The app allows you to make them parallel...
When meta data goes missing
An interesting article in the British Journal of Photography highlighted a recent piece of research that showed that you could lose some of your meta data when you upload photos to some platforms. When I started taking photos professionally I was surprised how much meta data you have to add to photos: information about the subject, who owns the photo, who the photo is licensed to, an image...
I heard it through the (social media) grapevine
I recently had the pleasure of being invited to visit Ostende by that city’s tourist board. I know all the jokes about Belgium, but I’m really looking forward to it. I’m a fan of Belgium. If I ever find myself in a Karaoke bar that does Jacques Brel’s Plat Pays, I’m on stage in a shot. Not very likely, I know. Though perhaps more likely in Ostend. I will ask the...
Mobile gets on the photography festival circuit
I took a train to Derby yesterday to visit the Format Photography Festival. I’d booked on a free street photography walk that doubled up as a tour of the festival’s main sites. It was also a good excuse to go and meet mobile mover and shaker, Misho Baranovic, who is running an ongoing project alongside Eyeem in a disused chocolate factory. There’s a huge printer printing off...
Silence is golden
Who was it who said: of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence? Oh yes, Wittgenstein. Well if the great Austrian philosopher had been on Instagram, he might also have said: if you get a narky comment, pass over it in silence too.
If you’re sat opposite someone and they ask you a question and you completely ignore them, they’d think you were being a bit rude. If you...
You're so vane
I’ve been taking photos for a few years, but I’ve only just gone full-time. And from my limited experience in the studio and on location, I realise I’ve got a lot to learn. The more you get into photography, the more you realise you don’t know. And photography is so deceptively easy (you just press a button) that people think that producing interesting images is easy too....
How ironic
I love Hipstamatic’s recent Tintype SnapPak, which includes the C-type (or cyanotype) film. In the words of the Hipsta blurb, this “film” adds a hand-painted quality to your portraiture” (not sure why they mention portraiture in particular - it does allow you take photos of non-portrait things).
Some interesting things about cyanotype I found on Wiki (I read it so you...
February 2013
10 posts
Share and share alike
I just retweeted the mini-obituary of the Mobile Photo Group (MPG) posted by one of its own members and a good friend, Sion Fullana. The mobile photography world is turning very quickly and this news marks the end of one of its early groupings. As other groups such as Ampt and Juxt move into the same space, there are various new initiatives and groupings taking form that will shape the mobile...
Snapping at heels (quite literally!)
Slightly afraid I might be stepping into a PC minefield with this one, but here at iphoggy-bloggy we like to push the boundaries a bit so let’s give it a go.
I was on my way to meet a couple of friends at the über trendy Soho House in the ultra trendy Shoreditch with my wife last Saturday night (he says, already putting himself in a certain slightly dodgy demographic). As we got off the...
Instagram's web-based platform: must do better
Instagram’s much-trumpeted launch of a web-based platform was perhaps in part prompted by Flickr’s launch into the mobile world. Flickr finally got round to developing a best-in-class app for the mobile, but unfortunately Instagram’s web-based response is firmly at the bottom of the class. In fact, it is so lacking in features, it’s standing in the corner with a dunce cap...
London v New York
I found myself wandering around the streets of London yesterday. I’d had a press shoot at Tate Modern early in the morning and had a lunch planned. But they blew me out (I think my ex-employer would secretly like to put a 1-mile exclusion zone for me around their office) and rather than just going straight back to the burbs, the light was quite good, so I thought I would see what I could...
Boyfriends, shoes and painted nails
As I might have mentioned (trying not to brag) I recently visited the United States. After speaking at Macworld in San Francisco, I stopped off in New York to visit a very good friend and some of my wife’s family. The family do was a big gathering of the Irish clan in New Jersey, with four of my cousins and their children, all together eating a huge turkey and the most delicious mash potato served...
Matisse would've loved iphoneography
I went to an exhibition of work by Matisse last week at New York’s excellent Metropolitan Museum. The theme of the exhibition was Matisse’s habit of re-working his paintings two, three, often, more times over. He would paint the same scene in different styles, veering from pointillism, to expressionism, to fauvism, with “chameleon-like versatility”. Can you guess what...
Instabragging
If you’ve been reading this column for a while, I hope you know me well enough to think I’m not a bragging sort of person. So when I mention that I’m currently over in New York after having visited San Francisco, I hope you realise that I only mention it because it is relevant to this week’s column. I read a blog a couple of months ago about bragging on Instagram....
Beach Boys in colour, UMO in b&w
Listening to Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. Everyone raves about Pet Sounds but, as a Brit kid raised during gritty post-punk, I’d always struggled with the blue-eyed shineyness of The Beach Boys. But it was going for £1 in a charity shop, so I thought why not.
On every song, they sound like they’re sitting in the middle of an aircraft hanger, a huge echoing open space. And Brian Wilson’s voice...
Why didn't Mango just buy it from Instagram?
In a story recently broken by Instagramers it was revealed that the clothes shop Mango copied an Instagramer’s photo and printed it on a tee shirt, which they offered for sale. We’ve been here before, with brands thinking they can just steal someone’s photo and use it themselves. Vogue Espana stole one of @SionFullana’s images and posted it on their own Instagram feed. But...
Call the photography police!
Whenever I hear some old big-camera fogey complaining that mobile photography is just 1) too easy; 2) just a load of filters; or 3) rubbish, my standard smarty-arse retort is: “Well, call the photography police”. I’m being ironic of course, because, as we know, there is no photography police. But my serious point is: mind your own business, we’ll do what the hell we want...
January 2013
7 posts
2 tags
Are you ready for the advanced course?
Last week I launched an advanced iphoneography class, which, I’m very pleased to say, sold out in one day! But I’ve added some new dates so if you’re in the London area and are interested, please head over here and check it out. If you’re not sure whether you’re up to doing an advanced course, below are ten tips that I taught on my introductory course. If you know...
4 tags
Lies, damned lies and... Oops this account no...
The social media bloggers have been firing statistics at each other since Instagram announced their now aborted TOS. One side says a) Instagram users were heading for the exits like the proverbial rats leaving a sinking ship; and the other says b) Instagram is right as rain, couldn’t be better, thanks. Vested interests aside (and I’m sure there are a lot of them), what is clear is that...
3 tags
Fear of the unknown, fear of the iPhone
Since re-connecting to Flickr after the launch of their mobile app, I’ve been seeing a lot more big-camera images. The photos I see from my contacts on Flickr are both mobile and big-camera, with no distinction between them. Which is a great thing. Sometime soon, no-one will really bother whether an image is produced with a mobile camera.
On Flickr, I’ve reconnected to a lot of...
1 tag
Instagram's new TOS out today. Did anyone notice?
So, Instagram brings in its new “old” terms of service today. How do we feel? Scrolling through my Instagram feed, there’s lots of snowy pics, the usual tube sleepers, some of my IGers friends having a pub meetup. No blank squares or messages of protest. And not a sausage on my Twitter iphoggy list. So, a pretty good result for Instagram. Phew! There are some reports of a dip in...
5 tags
Tags and likes and butlers
I was at a pub quiz last night. One of the questions was, what name did a Facebook-obsessed couple in the US recently give their newborn baby? The correct answer was “Like”. My team’s incorrect guess was “Hashtag”, in my view a much cooler name for a child. On Instagram, hash tags generate likes. But if you read my blog last week, you’ll know that one of my new...
Top 10 new year mobile photography resolutions
It’s new year’s resolution time! You may have vowed to eat more roughage and not clip your toe nails while watching television in 2013, but how about some resolutions for your mobile photography? Here are some suggestions, loosely based on my own half-hearted intentions:
1) Use Snapseed less. Especially the drama filter. Google bought Snapseed in 2012: proof if proof were needed...
3 tags
If this then Instagram is a bit mean
In the good old days, when you uploaded photos to Instagram, if you had an account with Flickr, you probably also used Instagram’s share option to parallel upload your photos there too. And while you were at it, you probably sent a copy to Facebook and Twitter for good measure too. It was just another couple of taps and who’s counting anyway. Some purists used to moan a bit about it,...
December 2012
11 posts
3 tags
One thing I really like about Flickr
Like everyone in the iphoneography world, I’m weighing up my options. Instagram may have reverted to its old TOS, but it’s as if you found your partner in a romantically-lit bar in the clutches of someone else before they actually cheated on you. They burst into tears and begged you to come back and they didn’t actually do anything. But they would have if you hadn’t turned...
4 tags
Chop off Grandad's head for Christmas
Are you secretly slightly not looking forward to watching Morecambe and Wise this Christmas? Apologies to our non-UK readers, but suffice to say, it’s a show from the 70s shown every Christmas Day in the UK which it is against the law not to watch. But provided you are in the same room as a television showing the show, you are technically within the law. And so you are legally free to fiddle...
1 tag
A conversation somewhere in Silicon Valley...
Brian: So we all set for the big announcement next week? Pete: Sure thing. Though less of the “big” please. I don’t think they’re gonna notice. Lawyers say put up a little notice on their feeds and then PR say just keep on banging on about ownership. Nothing’s changed right? They still own the photos. Just when they post them up, they may as well sign a 100-page...
2 tags
Go on - laugh it up
You may have already seen the hilarious youtube sensation (no not Gangham style) to poke fun at some of the cliched images and lack of originality on Instagram. Set to Nickelback’s Photograph song, if you haven’t, here it is in all its mocking glory, but make sure you come back to finish off reading this blog once you’ve seen it. Back? So, what did you think? Yeah, my thoughts...
3 tags
All good things...
The old flickr mobile app was little more than a portal to their online presence. Their brand new iPhone app is a big step up in photo-sharing apps, plus you get a ready-made fully-functional online platform thrown in for good measure with around 80 million users for you to make friends with. And it’s a major bridge between the mobile and the big camera worlds. As I said recently, the...
5 tags
Update duel: Snapseed (Google) v Instagram...
Seconds out, round 3. Ding! The two fighters’ seconds, Greg Google and Freddie Facebook, towel down their charges, slap them on the cheeks and send them back into the ring. Snapseed throws a heavy right hook with its latest update, the plucky Instagram counters with an upper-cut… OK, enough of the boxing analogy. Google’s Snapseed and Facebook’s Instagram recently brought...
4 tags
Are you allowed to take photos on the tube?
I’ve talked about taking photos on the tube before. About how a smart phone camera allows you to get closer than ever before to capture genuine human expression. I was at a talk the other day at The Photographers Gallery by a photographer called Tom Woods who has an exhibition of his pictures of people in the 70s and 80s in his native Liverpool. It’s a great exhibition if you’re...
2 tags
If Seinfeld were on Instagram
I’m a big fan of Seinfeld. Correction: huge fan. A few years ago, I went through the whole nine seasons and rated and made notes on every episode (there are 163). So imagine my joy when I discovered a new Twitter feed called Modern Seinfeld or @SeinfeldToday, which started up today. At the last count, it had just over 50,000 followers (in just over 23 hours) and by the time I finish writing...
3 tags
Thumbs up or heart?
It may be tempting fate for a blog to play down the importance of words. And sometimes people bemoan the “like like like” culture of social media. It’s all so impersonal, they say, it’s too easy just to click the heart button. On Instagram, if you get a certain number of likes, you get on the popular page, or whatever they call it now, whereupon your like numbers go...
2 tags
mObilepixatiOn exhibition: high-apped...
I’m wary of plugging things to do someone a favour. I try to make sure that whatever it is, it’s something genuinely good. I don’t want to waste the valuable time of my iphoggy bloggy’s esteemed subscribers. And this next thing has more than passed the goodness test. In fact, it’s cracking. It’s another real-life exhibition of iphone images: mobilepixation,...
