Jorge Quinteros

Clawing The iPhone Pt. I

When people talk about iPhone photography, the subject of conversation generally centers around app recommendations, platforms in which to best share your photographs, techniques on shooting and even the availability of nifty accessories who’s sole purpose is to make you as close to feeling that the device is as versatile and reminiscent to any other point and shoot camera you could buy.

The advantage the iPhone has over a “regular camera” is not so much technical a one but more a utilitarian one since the likelihood of always having it in your pocket is far greater. Then of course there’s the allure for us to shoot, edit and publish our findings all from the convenience of a mobile workstation that pretty much covers all aspect of communication and that potential alone is what’s addicted me and everyone else to sharing content that we would otherwise neglect to acknowledge.

In this case, I’m not particularly interested in adding to the litany of articles available that talk about what apps people use or the workflow they have for editing their photos. All these are tips and details which are definitely insightful but at this point I don’t have anything novel to add to a process that should practically be secondary to everything else. This is the part where I would undertake a philosophical stance and tell you that one should “focus more on what they shoot rather than what they’re using to shoot…” which at the risk of sounding trite, is all true.

Anyways, over the period of photographing continuously with the iPhone, I became very perceptive on something which I surprisingly haven’t heard a lot of people talk about. Like anything in photography, a lot of what we do and the tools we use are all subjective so I think it goes without saying that something as having a preference to how you hold your camera kinda topples into the same bucket.

When I visualize a person getting in position to shoot with an iPhone, the posture that comes to mind as far as hands is identical to how Lisa Bettany is seen photographing which is how I assume most people hold the device. This is how my wife does it and I guess it’s what I did at the outset but as I began immersing myself more into candid street photography predominantly do more of with with iPhone, I could tell you that holding it this way is not the most low-profile approach for me because it’s the straight forward equivalence of standing aimlessly with a Frommer’s guide book in the middle of Time Square. I don’t want to be noticed but I still want to feel comfortable using something that’s valuable to me.

This is how I clench the iPhone in my hands when photographing on the streets. Despite a friend’s remark, I don’t think it’s unusual. I refer to it now as “clawing the iPhone” because that’s how my friend Victor described it when he pointed out the odd similarity to a bird gripping on to a twig or something. I use my thumb to press on the shutter button and it’s as easy as that.

All the shooting happens with one hand and as comfortable as I’ve become using it this way, I have the inevitable fear of accidentally dropping the phone one day. It’s hasn’t happen yet. The ideal situation would be to continue shooting the way I do while having a piece of mind in that my iPhone wouldn’t randomly slip from my claw grip because my fingers would be inserted into 4 loops that would coincide with the placement of my fingers.

These 4 plastic or silicone loops would be an integral built-in feature of an iPhone case that caters specifically to people who like me, have found comfort in holding the iPhone the way I have while photographing with it. I hope it’s not difficult to envision what I’m describing. Perhaps a drawing would have been more helpful? I’ll defenitely have a follow up to this post later on and by that time I will have found someone to sketch up a better representation of what I’ve just described.

What’s Already Out There

There’s a few iPhone accessories that are meant to replicate the handle of a “real camera”. I’ve never experimented with any of them since none really solve the problem of securing the phone the way I would want it in my hands.

The POPA and the Shutter Grip come pretty close but utilizing these accessories requires one to remove your iPhone case which I know not everyone uses in the first place but I unequivocally do.

So what’s my solution to this frivolous problem? I’m not sure yet. The answer should be obvious but it’s the execution that requires some thinking so until then, I’ll continue to “claw” the iPhone they way I’ve already grown accustom to. I love the idea of developing an iPhone case that is custom made for me. I’m not looking to mass produce anything. Right not everything is just ideas.

Saving URLs with Sendtab

I’m generally not one to review software so considered this more as a way of just me sharing with you how I’ve been coping with this assignment of saving content that I stumble across on the web.

As far as articles are concern, I utilized Instapaper to store lengthy write-ups that I will eventually sit back and read over on my leisure. For videos, I use Radbox which has similar functionality as Instapaper in that you rely on a simple bookmarklet to save videos to view later.

But how do you manage links? Pretty often I come across links that are shared on Twitter which may or may not be related to an article and I’m not always keen in sending everything to Instapaper or emailing to myself because it clutters both. It’s like my desk drawer. The more stuff I dump in it, the less likely I’ll want to dedicate time to cleaning it so the best practice I have with Instapaper and emailing myself is to put away the stuff I really care about and the rest can be disposed quickly if I don’t need to reference it later.

On Twitter, what I would normally do was Favorite the tweet that had the link I was interested in and follow up with it on the computer once I got home but lately I’ve been using this app called Sendtab to kinda replace what I’ve been doing with Twitter.

Sendtab is a simple utility that essentially brings the flexibility of sharing links across multiple devices such as your iPhone, iPad and of course your computer. There’s a browser extension available for both Safari and Chrome that will allow you to sent links to your other devices.

Last night I was able to read from my iPhone a little bit about the launch of Ethical Coffee but I eventually wanted to dedicated more time to learn about this fascinating partnership between 2 coffee enthusiast and a Nicaraguan coffee farmer. So what I did was copy the URL to the site, launched Sendtab and clicked on Send a Tab. Once I eventually launched Safari on my MBP, the URL to ethical coffee was there.

Cody Fink over at MacStories has a more detailed write up on the app if you’re interested in reading up on the installation details but here’s a few quick impressions from my time using it:

• I’ve now seen enough beautiful interface designs in the majority of iOS apps I use that it’s difficult to bypass how good of a service an app may provide if it looks terrible. Sendtab needs a major overhaul.
• If I’ve just copied a link on my iPhone, it would be neat if Sendtab automatically detected it and asked me if I wanted to Add the URL rather than have me pasting it manually all the time.
• If you’ve saved up to 8 links on your iPhone or iPad and you then launch your default browser (in my case Safari), 8 tabs will automatically open up directing you to the page of the links you had saved. That’s pretty annoying. I want to view these links at my disposal so instead I just head over to my Sendtab page and view the history of all the links I’ve saved so far which I can then click on one-by-one as oppose to having them all displayed at the same time.

A Tool That Helps Me Tell a Story

Whether you classify yourself as a street photographer or not, we’ve all participated in the genre and never have I felt more like a declared street photographer than when I’m shooting with the iPhone.

The device is highly identifiable but what you’re doing with it is not always apparent simply because the options of what you can be accomplishing are practically endless seeing that there’s an app for everything. That works in our favor because you can essentially get away with photographing subjects under circumstances that wouldn’t be as easy using a dSLR.

Prime example of how I feel utilizing the iPhone “as a tool that helps me tell the story I wanna tell” is this Blurb video of Emmy award-winning and multimedia journalist Richard Koci Hernandez. He talks about his passionate iPhone-agraphy tactics and how mobile photography appeals to those who are captivated by the act of instantly shooting and sharing. His observation in that no one pays attention to you if you wear headphones is spot on. 95% of the photos I’ve secretively shot using Camera+ have been taken this same way.

This past week my Instagram feed had more activity than usual because I was commuting to Manhattan everyday via subway to undergo training for a position I took on with a new company. My general work commute has always constituted driving, so the change of scenery of traveling into a city that’s practically begging to be photographed was thrilling.