Looking through the gate...magazine pages...and moving on...

Yeah, it's been a few months since I last posted.

I'll explain more in a bit...

But first, some recent news.

Just a few weeks ago, I found out that this photo

was one of this year's honorable mentions 

in the Mobile Photography Awards

Travel category:

"Changing of the Guard,

through Gwanghwamun Gate"

(taken in Seoul, June 2011, iPhone4,

edited with snapseed and BigLens)

That trip to Korea several summers ago was when I first had my eyes opened to mobile photography...and then about 7 months later, after I got the snapseed app, I began this blog...

And, in

TZIPAC's upcoming special issue of 

43mm magazine,

(an exposé on mobile photography)

I'm honored to be published

on pages 124-127:

Peruse this issue's pages...

It truly is an honor to share page-space with some of today's great mobile-photography artists...

=====================

So, yes, it's been a few months since I last posted.

I'd been re-thinking if/how to proceed with this blog--which began with my initial interest in mobile photography. I can hardly believe it's already been two years since I began it...I averaged 3 posts per month the first year, but last year, I only posted a couple of dozen times...

One of my posts, back in 2012, even caught the eye of the snapseed team and was featured in their newsletter: http://snapseeded.blogspot.com/2012/03/step-by-step-from-sidewalk-in-insadong.html 

It was a step-by-step 'how-to' showing the potential of snapseed, which back then, hadn't become as well-known...

But since then, while I still use snapseed as my 'go-to' editing app--my 'intial digital darkroom' for my iPhone-photos--I've incorporated other apps into my 'toolbox,' and it no longer seems reasonable to continue a blog about iphoneography which features only one app in its title. 

And so, after two years, this is the last post for snapseeded...

I'll continue posting iphoneography--and even that term, I wonder how much longer it will 'live'--on my other blog, allophile.com. 

It's been such an interesting time to be involved with photography and image-making, as phone-cameras have exploded...Art, journalism, travel-photography--all are being affected by what many are calling a 'new democratization' of photography due to mobile photo technology...I'm looking forward to seeing how it all will continue to evolve...

=====================

I think back to what I wrote in the first post of this blog...

I'll re-post it here:

--------------------

With snapseed so ideal for travel-photos, for capturing and playing with a sense of place,

this description of travel, by writer Rebecca Solnit, comes to mind:

"Perhaps people travel for pleasure because the visual is much more memorable than the tangible, the seen than the felt.  At the time, traveling may be nothing more than a series of discomforts in magnificent settings:  running for the train to paradise in a heat wave, carrying an ever heavier pack in alpine splendor, seeing sublime ruins with stomach trouble. Yet it is the field of images and not the body of sensations that lingers.  My mother once remarked that if women remembered what childbirth felt like, no one would have more than one child.  And so I, third child of a third child, owe my existence to forgetting and my taste for travels to the dominance of the eye..."

(--from A Book of Migrations)

"The field of images...the dominance of the eye..."

     ...all to be played with in the palm of one's hand...      

---------------------------------------------------------

Let's see where it continues to go...

...in iPhoneography Central's "Apps Uncovered"

Last week, iphoneographycentral.com published the recent installment in their "Apps Uncovered" series...and I'm honored to have two of my 'snapseeded' photos included:

"Red Doors, Sokcho"

Backstory/Apps Used: --like stepping back in time, this seaside district of Sokcho, S.Korea; a relic of the Korean War--the houses of N.Korean refugees and their descendants in the "Abai village" neighborhood (snapseed & colorsplash apps used; this photo among the "Honorable Mentions" in this year's Mobile Photo Awards)

     For "Red doors, Sokcho"--I took this with an iPhone4 a couple of summers ago. Not far from the location of the upcoming 2018 Winter Olympics, Sokcho, South Korea has a frontier-feel. (The setting is gorgeous--between mountains and the sea, but lax zoning laws have led to haphazard construction.) The neighborhood where I saw this streetscape is a relic of the Korean War--on a spit of land between a lagoon and the sea, refugees from what would become North Korea built makeshift dwellings, thinking these would be just for the short-term... When the DMZ was drawn in 1953, they found themselves stranded, and this neighborhood has now been home to a several generations of these N. Korean descendants. It feels like a different world from the wifi-and-caffeinated frenzy of Seoul. I used snapseed and the ColorSplash apps for this scene. ColorSplash allowed me to isolate the red doors and shirt stripes, converting the rest of the scene into greyscale. Then I used snapseed's 'tilt-shift' filter and the 'white balance' option found among the 'tune image' options. Combining the 'hyper'-sepia tone and the red accents reminded me of the traditional color scheme used in many older Korean scroll-paintings.

"Bear Canyon, evening"

Backstory/Apps Used: I took the photo with my iPhone5 a few months ago while on a trail-run in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains on the edge of Tucson, Arizona. Winter evening light is just gorgeous in the desert. I used snapseed to convert the shot into a black-and-white scene, then used ''white balance' in the 'tune image' to warm up the scene. I also used the 'drama' filter to play with the contrast. The 'tilt-shift' filter in snapseed and then the "BigLens" app allowed me to smoothen out the sky.