It has been a little over three years since my last post on this blog. Because Covid. Because lockdown. Because of repeated bouts of illness culminating in what felt like three reinfections with Covid XBB1.5, starting in October 2022 and ending (hopefully) just over a week ago.
During the three lockdown periods we had here in the UK I managed to keep my photography going by creating two Lockdown Diary albums on Flickr, one in colour one in mono. But there were no photos of my favourite subject: the street. I had to restart my street photography after several months’ break.
I imagine that a lot of photography blogs got lost by the wayside during that period, though others might have started; other people’s Lockdown Diaries, for example, though they probably didn’t last long.
So far in this blog I’ve explained how I studied the photos in Flickr Explore from 2007 onwards to learn what I was ‘doing wrong’ with my photography, and how to get better at it. I explained how I formed the three principles of Encapsulation, Orientation, and Colour Toning that gave me a big head start, when the photography books were telling me about aperture, shutter speed, and ISO – leaving me asking, “But how do I use those to make pictures?”
I’ve given plenty of examples illustrating the principles of Encapsulation, Orientation, and Colour Toning, as well as examples of some of the styles or themes in street photography, such as juxtaposition of coincidences, and how the three principles enhanced my mono photography to the point I’ve reached today.
So I’m now at the point where I don’t feel I’ve got much more to say on the subject, and all I can do now is just share my latest photos. And that wasn’t the point of this blog.
I do have one new idea that came out of discovering the work of Marina Sersale who uses the Hipstamatic app to create her excellent street photography. This prompted me to try using Hipstamatic in my work, with some success.
Hipstamatic was one of the really early ‘instant photography’ apps, if not the first, that emulated old instant cameras – not only with the look and feel of the interface but also with the presets they offer you. It predated Instagram by a full year and possibly inspired Instagram in the first place. Rather than just offering a set of presets, it offers a set of Lenses which emulate the effects of using different physical lenses and so affect the focus or the vignetting, etc. It offers a set of Films which emulate the effects of using different physical films, different ISOs, different processing, and different frames. And it offers a set of Flashes which affect the way the light interacts with the Lenses and Films.
The results don’t just make your photos look vintage, though. There’s a lot of leeway in the processing. And you can take a photo using any combination of Lens, Film, and Flash and then reprocess it using different combinations later. You can also edit features like sharpness, saturation, contrast, and so on. And one of its best features is that you can process and edit any photo in your Photos app, whether it was taken using Hipstamatic or not, and whether it was taken by your phone or any other camera. So it’s really versatile.
For example, I’ve taken photos with my ultra-sharp Sony RX100M7 compact camera and run them through Hipstamatic. I’ve also used the excellent Halide app on my iPhone in order to avoid Apple’s usual over-the-top processing, and then run the resulting image through Hipstamatic. It’s a great way of being creative.
But is this enough of a subject to warrant keeping this blog going? I don’t yet know, but I don’t want to just limp along maintaining a vanity project.
I’ll make my decision at some point in the future.
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert
mono log 