i forgot my camera

Well, I never thought this day would come, even after reading so many evangelical posts about how people were using their iphones more than their DSLRs and also being a big fan of today in the office which exists purely on that premise I’ve always said I’ll stick to my 5d thankyouverymuch – but I’m publishing a post with just photos from my phone.

It’s less ‘ooh look these are just as good as photos from my big camera’ and more just ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’ though, since I realised  that I had forgotten to bring my camera when we had already got onto the dual carriageway, and it seemed like too much of a hassle to go all the way back home to get it. I was annoyed for a good while since I was looking forward to visiting the Burren for the first time in a few years and doing photography for fun, which you can only do when the mood takes you, and for me that comes with being inspired by my surroundings.

The iphone camera does compare favourably to any other camera for photos like that one above, where there’s no tricky contrast to deal with and you don’t need shallow depth of field, and where you’d be using a wide lens anyway. I’m not sure what the actual specs are but I’m sure it’s effectively wider than the 50mm on my 5d, so I tend to keep it for close up shots of objects more than anything else, instagrams of cake probably being the most common.

Oh, look! It’s an instagram of cake! Well, apart from the ‘make everything look vintage‘ filter. We brought the last of the results of my Good Friday baking along for a picnic, and stopped at one of the handy roadside viewpoints to nom it and enjoy the view.

On the other side of the road is that quality bit of wall from the first photo above. They do drystone incredibly well in the burren, and it’s difficult to resist taking hundreds of photos of just fields with stone walls. Apart from the coast road with an excellent view of the sea and the splitty rock surface that I’m sure has a proper name I don’t know, the other side of the Burren that I love is the mostly flat area with random bits of that splitty rock – and if it had been May we could have seen the flowers that grow in those cracks and make the area so unique – but at the moment the hawthorn (or is it blackthorn?) and gorse steal the show, and as we drove home with the sun beginning to drop it backlit the blossom in such a magical way, if I’d had the 5d I would have spent quite some time shooting it with predictably shallow depth of field, but I knew that magic would probably be beyond my capability with the phone camera to replicate faithfully.

I spent the whole time we were passing that gorgeous sight wondering if it was worth a try anyway, but didn’t bring myself to stop until we were past the really lovely bit and took a couple of shots of a little river in a field beside the road where there was tall grass either side, it caught the sun in a pretty way which mostly evaded capture.

And a vague attempt to shoot the blossom, because I just couldn’t resist.

They remind me of VSCO type landscapes, which are nice, but not my photos. I come back to wondering whether shallow depth of field is the sum total of my photographic style, and if that’s why I’m happiest on full frame with a fast lens. I try to stop down a bit for professional shooting so that I have more than 1mm of my subject in focus, but the more stuff that’s sharp in a photo, the less it feels like ‘mine’…

So, I didn’t come to the conclusion that I can do without the big clunky monster that is my 5d for short trips and photos that are slightly less casual than instagrams, I just kicked myself about all the lovely shots I didn’t get to take. At least I know I’m definitely on a particular side of that fence now!