Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I suppose I am welcoming the season as well as evoking the memories of my own childhood summertimes, when everything seemed hot and dry and dusty.  Maybe that’s because we played in the hot dry dust and loved it.  Where I lived there were two corner stores both a mile away in either direction and that didn’t matter either because the trip there was as important as the candies inside.  Taking these images I felt like I was  photographing a feeling as much as any actual object.

This image is actually a bit of a fiction.  It’s two cell phone images combined, one exposure for the background and one for the reflection. Shot with the Nokia N95.

I like creating series of images and these developed out of  just being up and out when the sun came up and having my cell phone with me.

I wonder if I hadn’t included the shadow of my hand and the phone if it would be clear what was used to make this image.  Although this image is really all about the shadow anyway.  Cell phone manufacturers seem willing to make improvements to the cameras in phones but I don’t think that there is a real desire to make them equal to actual point and shoot cameras.  So just as I don’t make phone calls with my watch I’m destined to carry a separate camera, and that’s just fine by me.

I didn’t take many images with my Nokia N95 when I visited Seattle but the ones I did pretty much sum up my trip;  train,walk,bus,train.

In order to see the world  in new ways, well for me at least that is a desirable thing, it’s necessary to look at little things.  This can mean going back to look closer at something as happened with this image.  It would have been very easy to ignore this but the contrast of colour caught my eye and by careful framing with my Nokia N95 I was able to produce an image I like that is both about something and about the design of the image at the same time.

Here are some more shots taken with the Nokia N95.  I’m just starting out with the phone as a camera and am still in the process of deciding how it should be used and what it can and can’t do.

It’s been said numerous times that the best camera is the one you have with you.  The one electronic item that I carry more than any camera is my cell phone, so it stands to reason that I should have a phone that I can use as a camera “two birds one stone”.  While not the latest phone, I replaced mine recently with a Nokia N95 which has a 5Mp sensor and a f2.8 lens.  When compared to a dedicated camera the focus is slow and the controls are limited but working around these limitations is part of the appeal.

Because the sensor is so small separating subject and background with shallow depth of field is a challenge and you really need to select material that lays on different planes or has good contrast.  The photo’s I took were either taken with the phone set to capture black and white or with an eye to converting them to B&W later.  I will do some more with colour in a later post.