Discarded Rose and the iPhone 4

The iPhone camera (particularly the new one in the iPhone 4), as pointed out in an earlier post concerning prize-winning photos published in the New York Times, is not to be dismissed lightly as a snapshot camera with little value for the serious photographer.  The size of original images from the five-megapixel camera in the iPhone 4 is 27 X 36 inches at 72 dpi, which produces a 10 megabyte file. This file, when the resolution is resampled to 240 dpi, becomes a whopping 162 megabytes.  That's enough to give pause in anyone's digital vocabulary.

I printed an 11 X 14 of the discarded rose and the third person I showed it to said "how much?"  It was my first sale of an iPhone image—hopefully not my last.

The biggest problem I personally have with the iPhone camera is holding it steady.  There's not really much to hold onto on the little camera and this is exacerbated in my case through age and a problem with a tremor.  I frequently have to take a number of images before getting one that I consider acceptably sharp.  There are any number of apps (I use one called Photogene) that may be used in post to sharpen the image some.  This doesn't help much when they are uploaded to something like Facebook which down samples them again.

The main point here is not to blame the camera for a poor photograph.  It does what it does. The success or failure of the image within those limitations is up to the photographer.

Yes I use mine to take snapshots of my grandchildren—some of those are pretty nice also.

The title of the picture above, "discarded rose", comes directly from the circumstances involved.  Some ten-day-old roses were beginning to look tattered and worn and they were tossed into the garbage can in the garage.  I spotted them sticking out of the top of the can, pulled out the one that looked the most promising, laid it on the garage floor and made the image with my iPhone.  It's one of my favorite photos from the past few weeks.