Get Down, O Creative One

Yes, I use my iPhone camera extensively. It’s easy and always on my person, so...click. Clickclick. Clickclickclick. Probably my favorite way to play with it is with the app Autostitch. This seemingly simplistic app melds photos together to make instant panoramas.

Most people see it as a way to make lushly wide landscapes, much as I used it to make the beach shot in my last post. It is good for that, but I am not one to ever just accept the conventional and instead have pushed it to several levels to create a new way of playing.

Take for example this early pano out the windows at the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki. I married three fairly mundane shots and made something way more interesting. (It helped having the window frame curve, but you have to look for good fodder to start with.) Being able to replicate the magnificent surprise I felt upon stumbling on this view was most satisfying.

Very recently, I was wandering downtown Sydney, and after appointments headed to a shady bench at Hyde Park. We were having a heat wave (it’s summer there now, remember) with temperatures over 100º with everyone sporting flipflops and bare legs. I held my iPhone in front of me and pretended to text, but caught images of passersby trying for two, three, or four shots of them as they walked the path in front of me, then stitched them together.

Another example of something similar is this time-lapse pano of my Sidneysider friend walking her young granddaughter up the trail stairs.

I can’t say any of it is great photography, but it does keep this itinerant artist amused over and over. And the best thing is, this kind of practice in being creative pays off as it surely helps me be more playful and innovative in my studio work.