Ended up with a shot from Harissa, Lebanon. It’s just outside Beirut and there’s pretty amazing statue of  the Virgin Mary. This image uses the tiniest part of that statue, but i like the wide open possibilities of what a fresh year may bring.

You know the drill—image link is below. Enjoy and Happy New Year.

It’s complicated. But taking pictures shouldn’t be.

Chase Jarvis kicked things off with the “Best Camera is the One That’s With You.” Complete with an app for the iPhone and it’s own built in eco-system. The sentiment is true—without a doubt. A camera is better than no camera. Even when the Best Camera app was announced I think the iPhone 4 was still an undisclosed, rumor of a myth. And—to fall back into the well of gear geekery—the iPhone 4 really does have an extraordinary camera in it.

An entirely random image. The only reason it applies is that it was, indeed, taken with an iPhone.

David Duchemin consistently has some good rants about the gear thing, like this one on spending the money on tickets instead.

One of my all time favorite photographers Norman Mausfopf has been shooting with the same Leica kit for years. With the same film. Processed in the same developer. It hasn’t slowed Mauskopf from making absolutely magical photographs.

Other options followed for iOS—Hipstamic, Camera+ and finally Instagram—which really took off and started spawning it’s own set of services for sharing. But still, for people not keeping up it’s easy to write the whole thing off as “it’s just a phone camera.”

This is a good thing.

People change when you reach into a camera bag, pull out a some giant, begripped digital SLR with a gaping, hooded lens on the front of it. They get worried. They start second guessing what your motives are. You’ve become part of the situation instead of documenting it. Plus, you have to get it off that card, into a computer or iPad. Some people get obsessed with editing, culling, doing hours of post-processing.

Your iPhone on the other hand isn’t hanging off your shoulder along with another twenty pounds of additional lenses, a flash and extra stuff. You see an image or a situation and quietly retrieve your phone. Capture your image and move along. Plus, you can share it almost instantly—right from the “camera.”

The longer the majority of the population views the iPhone as a “not serious” piece of camera equipment the better. You can catch people a bit closer to being themselves. And it can be used to create compelling, challenging, work. Want more proof? Look no further than the results of the Basetrack project featured at Foreign Policy.

This isn’t to say I’ll be selling my dSLR any time soon. I do enjoy shooting with it—but it’s just way past time to stop thinking of the iPhone as a toy.

Anyhow, this was shot the evening of July 4—just as the sun was starting to set and the natives were preparing for round two of fireworks on the beach. I only brought the little LX5 with me. It really is a great little camera. I just need to remind my self to use it more often. The allure of the iPhone and Instagram’s. . . well. . . instant gratification is strong.

I’ve got another handful of digging out to take care of this weekend but hope to get back into photo mode early next week and see if there’s anything good

More later. I’m actually too tired to type much longer.

The usual drill, with the unusual aspect of the one-size fits most phenomena.

Seriously though, if this one-size fits all approach is a hardship, comment below and I’ll get back on the stick.

In 2001, I was lucky enough to go to Kyoto with my parents. It was actually a trip back for my father who’d been stationed there during his service with the U.S. Army. It was a fantastic trip. While he was there with the army, and there for good stretch, I’m not sure how much of it he actually saw. But I know we saw a lot of it that week we were there. Not all by any means.

Often it was the little things I remember the most. The noodle shop around the corner from our. . . let’s call it “college student suited” hotel to the fantastic sushi we had with one of Laura’s cousins and his adopted Kyoto family. We walked all over that city visiting—I don’t know how many—temples and gardens.

My parents were so patient as I obsessed about getting some shots in a few places, slipping out early in the morning to catch some of the good light and insisting that the film be hand checked in the airport (yes, this was still on film).

I called this shot “Prayer Tree” and I hope to go back one day to tie one myself.

Either way, enjoy.

Grab a MacBook Pro friendly size via the image above. Or snag an old school 4:3 version or big cinema display if that’s your thing.

A few words about the later first: It’s a fantastic little camera. It’s easily my new everyday carry camera with the 20mm lens on it. This is the closest thing to an heir apparent to my M6 which has been gathering dust for the last year and half. Actually, writing about how long it’s been since I’ve shot film could be another post entirely.

Where was I?

Right. Fantastic camera. My current workflow is Aperture. And that’s where digital rangefinder nirvana begins to crumble. The GF1 isn’t supported by Aperture. Apple seems to have let Aperture fall by the wayside in the grand scheme of RAW support. That’s  a bummer. Shoot JPEG you say? If you have a camera that shots RAW there’s only a handful os situations that makes shoot JPEG. I shoot RAW almost exclusively. Enter the Lightroom 3 Beta. I thought I’d have a good jump on the learning curve with my experience in Adobe’s Creative Suite.

Not so much.

I think some of it is that Aperture had really shaped my view of what to expect out of a photo management application. Apple consistently nails user interface. Aperture is no exception—it really is, at least in my opinion and experience, the better photo management application. This isn’t a shortcoming on Adobe’s part. It was a conscious decision by Adobe to publish a photo manipulation package for photographers. Comparing them becomes an exercise in apples and broccoli because of this fundamental difference.

But where Adobe appears to be pulling ahead is that they keep rolling out support for new cameras. I have a hard time imaging a technology that’s moving faster than digital photography right now. Keeping up with it all is a big deal. If Apple wants to continue touting Aperture as a solution for professional photographers they need to pick up the pace. Personally, I don’t need a lightroom. I want to get the shot as close to perfect in camera. Maybe bump the contrast. Maybe push the saturation a tick. That’s usually it. But I need RAW support.

I’ll eventually adapt to Lightroom’s workflow. It obviously works for thousands of people. And for now, I’m not planning on shooting hired work with the GF1. Not yet. So in that regard there’s some separation between church and state—rather personal and work. Maybe that’s a good thing.

These shots are some of the first I’ve taken with the GF1 taken over New Year’s Eve up in the North Carolina mountains.

I snapped these two shots with the iPhone on the ferry and had posted them to my Flickr account, Twitter and Facebook before we set foot on St. Thomas. (There’s still some issues with the WordPress iPhone app that need to be worked out a bit.)

I’ve gotten some questions about how I’ve processed some of these. So here’s the scoop:

A few weeks ago, I apparently drank some of the Chase Jarvis Kool-Aid. The flavor being the Best Camera concept. The Reader’s Digest version of that concept is that the best camera is the one that you have with you. For Jarvis that came to be the iPhone’s built-in camera.

If I don’t have my Canon 5DMk2 with me, I have the G9. In fact, around town it’s almost always in my bag. It’s easily the best point and shoot I’ve had. Don’t get me wrong, it still has some weak points. Chiefly the shutter lag. If it had a shutter response that was more akin to the 5D or any of my old film cameras I’d have no complaints with the camera.

Still, there’s a few times, when the G9 is just out of reach or it’s still in the bag in the office. But, I’m never without my iPhone. And the camera is decent if not spectacular. I think it has the same issues that most small sensor digital cameras have and that’s chiefly contrast. But for a 2MB camera phone it works. (Especially if you remember that “shutter” doesn’t release until you remove your finger from the “button.”) Being part of my “always with me” iPhone certainly has it qualify as the Best Camera on more than one occasion.

This is where software enters the picture. Like I said, the iPhone camera has it’s issues and can use a little help. I think software like Best Camera and Adobe’s Photoshop.com is much like the Lomography folks shooting with Lomos, Dianas and  Holgas. For the record: There’s a taped up Holga gathering dusk in the equipment locker behind me.

Where was I? Right. The same way those analog equivalents embraced the inexpensively, plastic-lensed cameras and the random color shifts, light leaks and whatever else happened through processing, I see the tweaking of the soft, flat images off the iPhone as a related idea. And there’s a certain irony to using all this technology to render images that remind me of family pictures taken with a 110mm camera.

The difference being that it’s much quicker to get these images out—to share them. Before, with film, you had to make an effort. You had to really work to get an image out. Film or slides needed to be processed, then printed—or scanned. Then you could get to sharing them. The process itself encouraged editing. Required it.

With digital? It’s on the photographer to really think about the editing process. Instead of simply uploading the contents of a card.

Shot this with iPhone and tweaked it with Ps.com’s mobile app. I’ve definitely started drinking the Chase Jarvis Kool-Aid. Of course, I took some with the G9 too but without a laptop this is the only way to post for this trip.