Well, I did say I’d follow up with a second post on the subject, that subject being the use of TiltShift Generator (iTunes link) to make your iPhone photos just a little more believable. I talked last time about the grammar of photography, and one of the constituent parts is our expectation of depth of field. This is ingrained in the way we perceive photos from the medium’s very beginnings – mostly because early photography used dirty great pieces of film, which, thanks to physics, meant very little depth of field unless you took some very specific precautions to avoid it. Nowadays, of course, it’s positively encouraged, and with good reason. It leads the eye towards a specific subject, namely the subject that the photographer would like you to consider.
So, the long and short of it is, we expect to see some evidence of DoF in our photographs. The iPhone, for exactly the same physics that made our early photographs very shallow-depth-of-fieldy, is likely to be sharp(ish) from near to far, on account of its tiny sensor. So it looks, well, cheap. And odd. And not what we’re expecting.
Take the two examples above. The first is straight from the camera. The second (which has also had some colour processing done to it) has had some blur added to it. The program is capable of making this far more gimmicky, but I’d advise against it. Anyway, you can see what I’m getting at. Essentially, the second one is closer to what we are expecting from some decent, fast glass and, as importantly, gives a sense of purpose to the photograph.
To give you some sense of background, I took this with my original, 1st generation iPhone some time ago, as I saw a photograph that seemed to suit the little camera’s angle of view, and had the potential to be a picturesque, if not particularly profound, photograph. I tried a couple of different angles, attempting to replicate what was in my mind’s eye – or, to be a bit more analytical about it, and with the benefit of experience and hindsight, attempting to replicate the photograph I would have made if I’d had a full frame SLR with some nice fast glass on the front of it. You can understand why it never matched my vision. However, with some newly available tools, I managed to produce far more closely what was going on in my head – something I’d normally do through a much more careful choice of focal length and aperture. Hence, well over a year later, something clicks into place. It’s not the world’s greatest photograph, I know, but it is a lot better than it has any real right to be.