Cell Phone to the Rescue!

The Genius Bar. Boulder, Colorado, 2014

I can’t remember if I have posted this image before or not. No matter. It is still worth another glance and friendly chuckle.

The above was made at the local Apple store with my iPhone 4–proving once again that the absolute best camera is the one you happen to have with you at the time.

It looks like our local cell provider is ready to upgrade us, for free, to the iPhone 5, probably because those now-ancient “5” models are gumming up the warehouse supply shelves with the recent release of the iPhone 6. I am looking forward to this upgrade as the camera in the “5” is much better than the one I currently have in the Paleolithic “4”. I’ll be going from 5MP to 8MP plus some other nice tweaks. (For an interesting comparison of all the iPhone cameras by generation, try this revealing article by Lisa Bettany.)

This upgrade will make my subway street photography project in Barcelona a whole lot easier. Even the Fuji X100s is too obvious in the close quarters of a subway compartment. With a cell phone, you can pretend to be surfing the web or texting, and be snapping away the whole time. This may become my “go-to” street machine for those occasions when extreme discretion is advised–“R-rated” street photography!

Here are a few first attempts from the Barcelona subway project (these, with the Fuji). Dozens of other, better and much more intimate, images escaped me because even the small, range-finder camera was too big and obvious to use without attracting unwanted attention.