Iphoneography, Photography made too easy?

I was on the tube home today and got caught up in the daily commute for the 9-5 suits coming home from Canary Wharf.  Tinned in a sauna hot tube carriage like sardines I found myself looking over a smartly suited middle aged man’s shoulder who was using the smallest space to edit a photo on his iPhone using Snapseed app.

He had a photo looking up at a skyscraper with a blue sky above reflected in the glass of the building. Admittedly it was a sound shot to start with but i watched him experiment with cropping it different ways using rule of thirds guides, then he ran through colour and effects filters and experimented with adding grain.

The first thing that sprung to mind was, does he know the reason behind film grain in a photo, the technical reason it occurs in a photograph naturally or is he oblivious to this and just sees it as a nice effect? Would he be able to take photo’s comparable to a knowledgeable professional with technology doing most of the work for him? Is his potential lack of photography knowledge a blessing for taking photos with a different almost quiloquial approach or is it limiting? Is a skill being lost as people don’t learn an art thoroughly and take short cuts to create what used to be complicated and highly skilled effects or is it creating freedom by making photography more accessible to more people? If I was growing up in a generation of film photography I may not have ever discovered photography so in a way the digital photography revolution started me off on my journey into photography as a hobby, passion, and profession.

I could go on about how it’s affecting photography as a profession but that’s something bouncing around my head I’ll vent another day :p

I’ve finally given into iphoneography as a growing movement and am embracing it too. Although I know the technical way to shoot and sometimes wish I had my proper camera kit on me, it’s actually pretty refreshing to take photos quickly and easily on the move and not worry too much about the perfection of the end result.

I already play with Photoshop and Photosynth apps for photography but am going to play with Snapseed too to see what is actually possible on a phone camera nowadays. Photography has changed soooo much over the last decade, I can’t imagine where photography will be in 10 years time. Iphoneography may be as big of an influence on the direction of photography as the Kodak Brownie that was most popular in the 50s and 60’s for putting point and click cameras in the publics hands for the first time.