hipstamatic – Riccarpics

Phones and Filters

Arthur Square, Belfast

Hipstamatic is a popular photography app for the iPhone, although probably not as popular as it once was. I think I may have mentioned it previously as every so often I delve into it to see what I can do.

Briefly it allows you to use filters on photographs taken with your phone as well as adjust settings, such as exposure, saturation etc. Some filters are overly dramatic but exercising some restraint can yield impressive results. By curbing your temptation to go completely over the top some striking images can be produced. I tend to tone down the filters and then perhaps adjust saturation, highlights and shadows to get where I want.

Anyway, for now

I’m still experimenting with my iPhone and Hipatamatic and having a great time. With no pressure to actually produce something it feels like a hobby, which I suppose it is. I always have my phone with me and when something presents itself that I think will make an image I snap it. Later I’ll spend a few minutes processing it in Hipstamatic, usually to make it look dramatic.

There’s an agency that specialises in licencing mobile phone images so if I produce something that I feel might work as stock off it goes. All done from my phone. I just need someone to buy some of them.

I’ve read the true, or expert, Hipstamatic user sets the app to produce the effect required before they take the picture. I’m not that skilled just yet. Maybe it’ll come.

With the pandemic and the free time it has brought I’ve been thinking about stock shooting. It hasn’t been financially viable to travel or put much effort into making images for stock for some time but I enjoyed it so I continued to produce images and submit them. There’s no avoiding the issue any longer however. If I continue to shoot for stock I’m subsidising multi million pound companies who in the past have reduced payments to photographers and will continue to do so in the future.

One company charges photographers up to 85% commission to licence their images. Often the photographer gets a mere 10 cents.

Anyway, for now I’m clicking away on my iPhone and I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops.

The Long Hole, Bangor, Northern Ireland — The Long Hole, Bangor

McKee Clock, Bangor, Northern Ireland — McKee Clock, Bangor

Eisenhower Pier, Bangor, Northern Ireland — Eisenhower Pier, Bangor

Entrance to Ward Park, Bangor, Northern Ireland — Ward Park, Bangor

Shirts hanging on a door handle — Shirts

Placing a shirt into a washing machine — Washing

iPhoneography

With a new, more infectious variant of the Coronavirus pandemic discovered and possibly spreading out of control and with the country in lockdown again things have been quiet on the photography front.

I’ve been using my time to organise my back catalogue, catch up on some reading, watch Netflix and there’s always something needing doing around the house.

When I’m not organising my images, reading or watching Netflix I’ve been having fun shooting with my iPhone and processing many of the images in an app called Hipstamatic. I don’t know if Hipstamatic is available for Android phones but if not there will be something similar.

I found fairly quickly that there are many apps for processing photographs on mobile phones and after some searching realised I wasn’t going to find one that did everything I wanted. This realisation prompted the decision not to spend any more time searching for it. Life is too short.

I initially started processing images in Photoshop camera and was happy with it but I found that when I exported the photographs they were being downsized. This must be down to a setting somewhere in the app but I wasn’t able to find it. If anyone knows please leave a comment.

I settled on Hipstamatic and then stopped looking.

When I get a chance to examine the images on my main monitor I hope, depending on their quality, to get some printed. I have an iPhone 8 with a 12 million pixel sensor which should be easily good enough for a 10 by 8 print.

I read some time ago, probably in F Stoppers, of a photographer who used his iPhone to shoot a wedding. The concept is called iPhoneography – I wasn’t sure that was a proper word but my spell checker hasn’t flagged it so it must be.

Some recent images are below.