Hello and welcome to 'Out of the Darkroom' on AdoramaTV. I'm Ruth Medjber,
and joining me on the show today is photographer Brendan Ó Sé.
Brendan is a master of iPhoneography and he's going
to share some great tips and tricks with us on how to get the best shots from our
own iPhone.
AdoramaTV presents 'Out of the Darkroom' with Ruth Medjber.
So, Brendan, thanks so much for joining us today. I know you're taking time out of your busy
schedule, what is it that you're up to at the moment?
I came up on Tuesday to the Web Summit here in Dublin as part of the Irish Tech News Team
I got the remit to come up and take some photographs
with the iPhone and other cameras aswell.
So the web summit is just like a big tech global gathering
Oh it's huge.
of people who are mad into apps and startups and iPhoneography
and all that kind of stuff. So you brought up three cameras to shoot this
event. What are they?
Nikon D7000, Fuji X100T and the iPhone.
The iPhone, ok. So am I right to assume or to say that the iPhone is your thing or
you're making it your thing?
It is and it isn't I suppose. It's what I've become known for because I've had a
degree of success with the iPhone in recent..in about a year or so but I try to
blur the lines between the genres of photography, iPhone photography or DSLR
photography. I think it's all photography, and all cameras are mobile.
Yeah, so I suppose with the iPhone I have had most success in recent times and that.
The success that you are speaking
about is that you won an award, didn't you, for one of your iPhone photographs?
It dates back to this time last year. I posted a photograph on Flickr,
a photograph I took in Copenhagen
and about two months later, representatives of Apple contacted me to license the photograph to use in their
iPhone 6 campaign that went global
in March which meant that it was on billboards in 70 cities in 24 countries around the world,
and then from that there's a knock on affect, yeah, I entered a few competitions. That same photograph won a
competition, then I had other photographs that I took with the iPhone that have subsequently won other
competitions
Wow, so you were kind of thrown into it...into the whole iPhoneopraphy thing.
You never set out to do it but it just so happenened to be that you shot it
on an iPhone.
Yeah, like I think, looking back, I suppose, it was 2012 with the iPhone 4 that I
really got into using the iPhone as a camera. I think that the quality improved dramatically from the 3 to the
iPhone 4. It coincided with Instagram as well, so that was more of an opportunity
to shoot, edit and share and what I found myself is that having the iPhone with me,
I went from a situation where before I would have the DSLR and only take it out
on occasion and that, you know, when I was out we had a lot of photographic opportunities that I would notice and
wouldn't be able to get because I wouldn't have the camera with me, but having the iPhone with me I
went to a situation that I became much more alert, much more sensitive, much more aware of
photographic opportunities and as a result began to shoot much much much
more and, like, looking back especially this year, because of, you know, the things
that happened to me... I was able to look back and realize that my development and evolution
as a photographer
really came from using the iPhone more and more and more and because, like, I think having the iPhone
has a zoom but the zoom is terrible on it and it's because of that, you know, it
requires you to be much more
deliberate in the composition that you're setting up.
I've noticed as well in your
travel photography, you kind of categorize your work by countries a lot
of the time. When you're going abroad
do you bring the iPhone or is it the D7000 or how do you work with that?
I'd bring any camera that I had,
and that I would go out, probably with two cameras. Like when I was in Tokyo in April, that I had
the FujiX100 with me and I'd always have the iPhone with me but
I kind of vary it to the side of photography that I want to do.
If I'm doing a blur abstract work I would use the Nikon D7000, more so than the Fuji, I think that the
Nikon is much easier to use than the Fuji.
Tell me a little bit about your process when you're out and about doing street
photography in the likes of Tokyo and that kind of stuff. Do you go intentionally to
take photos on a day and say today I'm going to do street photography and I'm going to
look for this shape, that shape, this kind of color or do you just go about your
business, go do whatever you need to do in Tokyo and just take the camera with
you and see what happens?
I always have the camera with me so it's not a case of that I'm going to
go out now with the camera for the next hour or two...when I'm out on the streets I'm always more alert
and sensitive of the photographic opportunities that may appear. Having the iPhone makes it much,
much easier because, you know, it's the streets and, you know, that people may not
know if you're using it as a phone or as camera and with practice, again, that I've
developed the ability to get in close without people realizing what I'm actually doing and
that's for candid photographs.
That's like your style, you know, how to do that now just through practice, I suppose.
Yeah, yeah and also being able to read the situation and kind of judge the
type of person, you know, how they might react.. I'd put myself in their position. If I
was in their position would like to be photographed and that, and I'd
have boundaries like that.
Quite respectful.
Yeah I suppose, you know sometimes, like later on, on the rare
occasion you come back to look at a photograph and you realize that what you've captured is..
you know, could be somebody sharing a very emotional moment or something like that and I wouldn't do that.
So Brendan, maybe you could tell me, then, a little bit about your post production process,
particularly when you've taken a shot on the iPhone. So what goes on before it
comes to us on Instagram or on Flickr?
OK, so I'd look through the photographs taken from a
particular day. You just set up an album so I can get them all into that and then when I'm going through
them I would click the favorite button which makes it easier for me to access when I go to work
on Snapseed, the go-to app on the iPhone would be Snapseed. Its a one stop shop.
Everything that I want to do, I'm able to do with it.
I found in recent times I'm doing less post-processing, you know, to try
get as much done in camera as I can but I pull the image into Snapseed, work a little bit on the detail,
adjust the contrast a little, and lately I like the film filters that they have, the grainy film filters
that they have and I probably just play one of those and that would be it.
Am I right in assuming that that's how you got the effect for your series, the 'Always Leaving' series?
The thing about those, actually, is that there's very little post processing in those,
that most of that is in camera, that I did that with the iPhone 4 which was,
before that it was just an attachable camera movement
so that I would have the phone down like this and very very quickly pop it up and then you'd have the distorted
blurred figure of the person you're taking the photograph of
That's fantastic.
And that, as the iPhones have developed,
the image stabilization has improved and its more and more difficult to do this.
You can't trick it anymore.
Yeah, so, like, that series of photographs would have been nearly all taken with the iPhone 4 or the iPhone 5.
Is there anything, like accessories and that kind of stuff? I mean, I'm shooting on the iPhone and I
find that I have very little control, you know, I can tap for exposure and I can tap
for focus and that's kind of my limit. How do you, you know, I'm looking at macro
shots and things like that.
Yeah, well, like, recently I've started to work with this fantastic little lens here from
Olloclip which is a 4 in 1 lens and really, really easy to attach. It just clips onto the iPhone and
this one has four different lens types, like if you unscrew it here you get a macro and it allows you to get
in exceptionally close to get the detail that you want. There's also a fish eye and a wide angle lens
so that would be one of the accessories that I use and it just adds an extra dimension to the photo.
And it's quite small so you can just carry it around with you. It beats carrying four massive lenses for your DSLR.
Yeah, and the quality is really good. Like
there are other lenses out there that I experimented with but this, the quality is probably...
The Olloclip?
Yeah. Definitely is the best.
Another series that I really love of yours is the punctuation series.
Maybe you can explain to us, without giving all your tricks away, how you do
that, how you do the series.
The best things in life comes from accidents and I was on Lightroom that
there was, one of the figures heads that I wasn't happy with and I was using the cloning tool
to try to correct it and the cloning tool in Lightroom is
circular, spherical. And that when I had it on the head I realized that what
I had originally intended to do trying to work it out, looked much better
when there was a sphere, a boquet head as they call them on top of it and I just
ran with that.
Tell me a little bit, then, for the viewers watching this and I
think it's always interesting for me as well to find out where photographers, I
mean I love your work, I love what you do I think it's absolutely fantastic but I always want to know
if this is your full-time gig or you know or is it a hobby? What's the level that you're at?
It's not a full-time gig. I'm a language teacher working in University College Cork.
Photography is my passion, it is what I do. It consumes me outside work and since
the kind of exposure with Apple and winning competitions and that I've had lots of
opportunities have come my way and I'm enjoying all of that. I'm enjoying that but
I'm very fortunate that the job that I do I love it. I get a lot of satisfaction from it and the workshop at
the moment in conjunction with the Glucksman gallery in Cork
So you're teaching workshops on how to use the
iPhone better for photography? I need to do this!
I'm also doing, I have one coming up in the Gallery of Photography in Dublin at the end of this month.
And I'm planning to have more workshops again in 2016 so there's your opportunity.
I'll have to put that in my book.
And what kind of stuff do you go through in the workshop?
Well, you see, the profile of people that would come in could be people who
have just bought an iPhone, don't know how to use it or you could have people who are coming from, you know, a
DSLR background wanting to use it or people who've used the iPhone quite a lot so I go through,
you know, the very basics in using the i Phone, the
basic settings in it and then how to manage light, composition and the post-processing thing as well.
Listen, thank you so much, cheers, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it.
Well that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed the show.
If you want to start the conversation then just leave me a comment below, I do appreciate the feedback.
If you want to brush up on your own photography skills then check out the Adorama Learning Center.
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Thanks, and I'll see you again soon!
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