Photography for the social media generation.

There was a point, in fact I can tell you the date…. it was July 7th 2005, when mobile photography suddenly got serious. Five and a half years later it’s amazing how far we’ve come from those grainy mobile shots of the London bombings. At the time Facebook was pretty much unheard of and Twitter was still a year away from it’s launch. BBC received 50 of the 1,000 total photos within the first hour all sent in via mobile phones.

It’s events like the July 7th bombing coupled with an increase in mobile technology that has paved the way for a dramatic rise in citizen journalism.

Flash forward to late 2007/early 2008 and we saw the beginning of ‘high’ mega pixels camera phones like the Samsung G800.

I can certainly remember rising my eyebrows at the prospect of having a 5 mega pixel camera in my phone and the possibilities that it would afford.

This was when mobile phone photography became the new way to shoot ‘street photography’.

The photography world as a whole was (and I guess still isn’t) convinced as many photographers found it hard to ignore camera like the Canon Powershot G10 which was perfect for street style photography and still allowed that certain ‘professional’ edge.

The small size sensors and the fixed focal length means that many camera phones were far too limited. But surely this was the point of street photography?

When I was a student (back in the good old film days) we defined street photographers as Lomo touting amateur louts who had little regard for image quality……. oh hang on….. I was one of those dodgy Lomographers who loved the fact that their £100 Russian camera was in fact rubbish!

It was in the summer of 2008 that the iPhone app store was launched and we welcomed back those retro styles in the form and tasteless filters and effects.

Today there are around 3000 photography apps available in the App store and of course many other available to Android phones.

There is a popular community site dedicated to iphoneography and of course a Flickr group with over 100,000 images in the group pool.

At the start of the year Photography Made Simple launched the UK’s First Ever Mobile Phone Photography Course……… and just last month Facebook allowed high resolution images to be uploaded (and downloaded).

The question I have is will the term ‘Street Photography” be forever claimed by the mobile phone shooters or will photographing with phones just become the norm?

At my last wedding whilst there were many cameras out on show I could certainly see that the camera phones outnumbered the compacts and DSLRs.

Maybe this article should have been called “The Rise and Fall of iPhoneography as mobile street photography” as you can’t very well give something a delightfully sounding cult status like that if everyone’s doing it!

Still, have a look at some accesories that are avaible…

Zgrip iPhone Pro

Zacuto has the first serious solution for shooting video with the iPhone 3Gs. It’s all about the stability and our solution adds just that. There is far too much side to side movement when shooting with an iPhone 3Gs even when trying to hold it with two hands very steady.

Eye Scope For iPhone

Get up close and personal with this amazing iPhone zoom lens. Simply click it on to your existing iPhone camera and get picture detail you never thought possible.

and we can’t forget the Joby Gorillamobile…