Since you can’t control flash (at least not yet from the iPhone itself), you don’t have much control over shutter speed, or aperture, or ISO, what remains in terms of creativity? Much still, and most central is photographic imagination. What would be some good practice tips for iPhoneographers wishing to exercise their photographic imagination? The following are a few exercises to help us develop that creative impetus:
iPhoneography in a Minute: Traditional exercise of walking about a minute away from your base, stopping once you’ve walked for a minute, and then looking deeply and shooting. Repeat the same in a different direction, and for two, three, four, five minutes… the idea is to learn to look deeply at our surroundings — the time duration is a framework for the practice of seeing and visualizing.
Attention: Good practice that I recommend to my students (and that was drilled into me by art teachers): look for texture, pattern, shape, color, tone, lines, rhythm, mood, and light. In particular, how does light hit and reflect from a subject? how is it absorbed? what variations exist at different times of day, inside, as diffused or filtered? Being that the iPhone is so limited in terms of managing light, getting to know what latitude it has with various lighting situations is helpful and leads to creative discovery.
Metaphor: shoot with a sense of metaphorical connections from the subject. What do you see, and how is it understood? what might it stand for? Don’t just observe the surface metaphor (e.g., long stem red rose for love), reflect for a moment on the cognitive map that a metaphor provides — how does it help you think beyond the surface? If time is money… how do we bank it, invest it, spend it, exchange it, earn it…? How do we visualize such relationships? As an extension, don’t think of the iPhone as a camera, and don’t think about it as a phone. What else is it? How do you capture an image with a gaming platform, or with a task manager? How might that inflect the way you see?
Lighting: Make it a point to go out and photograph light. Don’t think of a particular subject, or interesting scenes, just go out and shoot intriguing light. Make every image about the light and practice various shooting styles (fast, slow, with motion, landscape, vertical, etc.). Look for halos, edges, backlighting, front lighting, colored light, contrasts, shadows… how does the iPhone handle the variation in lighting? Tap to focus and expose in different parts of the image.
Edge Mania: What’s on the edges of your photos? Normally we focus primarily on the center of the screen, of the image. But… consider the corners of your images as bookends: what do they frame, how do they frame the image? What do those edges communicate? Think about left, right, top and bottom as more than just edges of the photo. Consider that these are the beginning and ending of a sentence through which you are telling a story. What do those edges help you say?
Visual Area: Use the entire visual area of your screen and image. Practice taking subjects out of the middle of the frame by placing them in edges, corners, and/or other locations. This is yet another way to practice varying angles, standpoint, vantage point, perspective — vary the way you shoot.
Limit your Visual Horizon: Go somewhere unexpected and draw a circle on the floor (with chalk, or delimit it with something else). Stand within that space and photograph from there. What do you see? How do you see it? What imaginative flexibility can you put into play within that limit?
Timed Compositions: Have your spouse, partner, or friend select four or five objects (related or unrelated) — give yourself five minutes to make four compositions. Shuffle and repeat.
Characters: Take up Diane Arbus’ quote as a challenge: “The world,” she wrote, “is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.” Walk out, find characters, and put them together into a story — either via photo essay, or by individual captures that help you tell a story. Do you return to particular story plots, or patterns? How are you emplotting the story? (in other words, how are you organizing it? according to what rules, expectations, or logic?)
There’s many other things to practice and play with the photographic imagination. Consider it play, not work, and you’ll be having fun and improving your skills at the same time.