Daily iPhone photos

For the last 136 days, I’ve posted an iPhone photo on the internet just about every day. Where I’ve missed the occasional day, I’ll post its photo the day after, but more often than not, I take a photo and publish it to Flickr on that day. It started out as an experiment, posting a photo to Twitter using twitpic, but it soon became clear that this was not an ideal solution whereby I switched to Darkslide, as described here. At first, I didn’t make too much of a song and dance about it as I didn’t know how many days I would last before giving up.

What the iPhone 3G can do with enough light

What I have learned over the last four and a bit months is that the discipline needed is rather hard at the beginning, but unsurprisingly gets easier as you do it more. However, even now I sometimes forget and have to start looking for something to photograph instead of just finding something.

Danger on flaking paint

Also, I very quickly learned the limitations of the iPhone 3G’s camera. It’s noisy in low-light, it’s fixed-focus and it’s basically not very good. The new iPhone 3GS has a significantly better camera that has a lens that can focus and is much better at managing differing light levels, something else the 3G suffers from being bad at. However, with practice and trial-and-error, you can get some decent photos with it.

Light fitting on the stairs to my work

The iPhone’s camera also has a rather slow scan, which can make action shots nigh-on impossible, but this can make for some intriguing effects of you move the camera while taking photographs. It takes a little getting used to the timing, but is an entertaining distraction.

Swinging camera

When there is a certain amount of light, the photo quality improves dramatically and the camera almost becomes a proper camera, albeit a mere 2 megapixel one. A friend of mine in Japan takes iPhone photos on a regular basis and some of his come out remarkably clearly. The reason for this is that there is apparently a better quality of light in Tokyo than there is in Glasgow. However, now that summer is threatening to give us proper light, we northern iPhone users may get some decent photos from our crappy cameras.

Blue sky, a statue and a bird.

So, as the saying goes, the crappy camera in your pocket takes better pictures than the fancy camera you left at home. Why not try taking a photo a day with whatever camera phone you’ve got. Post it to Twitter and show us what you can do.

A day dolphin spotting at Fortrose