The Art of iPhoneography by Stephanie C Roberts


I was really looking forward to getting my hands on this book and it didn't disappoint. It's a really quick read, but there's enough in there to inspire you and get the creative juices flowing. Stephanie starts with a brief look at the basics of how to capture photos with an iPhone. I suspect most people will just skip this bit as I did. Then she looks at a few key apps for editing. It was interesting to find out the apps that she rates and good to discover a couple that I didn't know about. It's definitely not an exhaustive list of all the good photos apps out there, but it's a good start.

The next sections of the book were what I found the most interesting. Chapter 3 contains 100 'Secret Missions' to spark your creativity with example photos to give you some ideas. Personally, I'm not sure how many of the missions I'll actually accept, but they did spark lots of ideas of my own which is great.

The 'Shoot How You Feel' chapter encourages you to take a more conceptual look at the images you shoot and get beyond just pointing a camera at the subject matter. Some of it is borderline-pretentious, but I did find it helpful to look at capturing images in a different way.

Next there is a series of profiles of iPhoneographers, which was one of my favourite parts of the book. Seeing how other people use the iPhone to capture and process images in such different ways was really illuminating and made me want to explore each of the photographers' work in more detail. The weblinks provided were really handy for finding out more.

Once of the most useful things I got from this book was the challenge to focus my iPhoneography more and be more intentional about setting out to do specific projects (For example to focus in on a particular subject, or to take a series of themed images all processed in the same way). So I'm going to carry on shooting random things, but also sometimes try and be a little more structured!

Verdict: 4/ 5 - I'd recommend Stephanie's book to anyone interested in iPhoneography - it doesn't cost much, is quick to read and I'm sure will spark some creative ideas.

You can marvel at Stephanie's iPhoneography on her LittlePurpleCow blog and you can also check out the site for the book here: www.artofiphoneography.com.