It’s not a glamourous story, but it’s a truthful one: I learned to take beautiful photos using my iPhone. I’d owned cameras before, of course. And anyone who grew up in the nineties knew their way around Kodak’s disposable cameras, me included. But before I got my iPhone, I took the phrase point-and-shoot literally. I aimed my camera indiscriminately at anything that caught my eye, primarily when on holiday, and hoped for the best. Occasionally, I got a shot that reasonably resembled what I hoped for, if I’d given any thought to what I hoped for at all, which I often didn’t. Most of my shots were dark, or blurred, or some combination of both.
My iPhone made it so much simpler. I could make dozens of attempts at the same shot – hundreds, even – until I got what I wanted. That repetition, free from constraints like the cost of developing film, allowed me the time and space to consider the outcome I wanted for a particular shot, as well as inifinite time to achieve it. With practise, I got better.
Eventually, I was able to take what I’d learned and apply it to taking photos with a real camera. And even to shooting on film again. (My results with film remain very mixed, admittedly.) But the truth is, my iPhone is still the camera I use the most often. It was certainly the camera that I used most on our recent trip to Paris which, as I type this, looking at snow falling outside my window, feels like a distant memory. I snapped everything we saw with my iPhone; lovely old doorways, pretty pastries in bakery display cases, museum exhibits and shop window displays. Anytime something caught my eye, I pulled out my phone and took a picture, because I could.
That’s the way I always dreamed photography could be, when I was a teenager toting my old film camera around. What you love in one moment, you may forget the next, while a sight you glimpse for a distracted second may stay with you for years afterward. You have no way of knowing, so when you have to be sparing with your snapshots, you often don’t get the images you’ll later realise you really wanted. Now that I can, I take pictures of everything and delete what doesn’t feel relevant or exciting once I’ve had time to give it some thought.
It’s true that iPhone photography will never be the same as film photography. It requires very little of the talent or skill, certainly none of the patience. But I don’t need to be a great photographer. What I need – or want, really, but it feels like a need – are tangible holiday memories that I can go back to again and again. IPhone photos give me that, which means they’ll always rank among my favourites.
