How It All Started

I grew up in a house surrounded by the arts. My father is a musician, composer, music teacher, voice coach, choir master, conductor, movie buff and an avid photographer. A lot to live up to. Over the years all of my attempts at creativity had ended in varying degrees of failure. My first love was music. Like a lot of teens I had dreams of being a rock star, playing my songs to adoring crowds in vast arenas around the world. The reality was that I spent approximately 10 years trying to learn how to play Desire by U2 before ultimately giving up on my dreams of super stardom. It would appear that musically ability skips a generation. 

In my mid twenties I toyed with the idea of being a screenwriter/director. My other passion apart from music is cinema. I decided that the music world's loss was going to be the movie world's gain so I set to work on my first screenplay. It was a tender coming of age tale set in a small rural Irish town that featured multiple car chases, explosions and finished with a John Woo style super slo-mo shoot out in the local shopping center. At last estimate the budget would've been around €150 million. Another dream bit the dust.

It was at this stage I resigned myself to the fact that I was only ever going to be a consumer of the arts and not a creator. I wasn't overly upset as there was a world of music and movies out there to be discovered. Anyway I already had a career in finance that paid the bills so for the next 15 years or so I concentrated on that and only occasionally felt a tinge of remorse that I hadn't given the world of creativity more of a chance.

I bought my first iPhone in 2009 and at the time the camera was the bottom of the list of criteria I had in mind when choosing the phone. In fact I probably wouldn't have used the camera at all only for the fact that I had 2 very young children at the time. There is a saying in photography circles - 'The best camera is the one you have with you'. Despite the fact that the camera on the phone was only 3.2MP I always had it with me and was able to whip it out of my pocket to capture those cute and candid moments. Of which there were many in those early years.

As time went on I found that I was starting to take more and more photos. And not just of the kids. As cute as they were. Every time I visited a new location I was on the look out for photo opportunities. Below is one of the first 'artistic' shots I took. In 2010 we had a particularly harsh winter which meant that I was surrounded by beautiful frost covered scenes everywhere I went. It was a photographer's paradise and although I definitely didn't consider myself to be a photographer by any means I still found myself fascinated by trying to capture the scenery around me.

As the weather improved I still took every opportunity to get out to take photos with my phone. By now I had discovered photo editing apps on the AppStore. These meant that I could made basic changes to my photos. The images from the early phones were quite flat and dull but with a bit of tweaking with an an app such as Snapseed I could bring them to life. One of the other apps I downloaded at the time was called HandyPhoto. It had a Retouch Tool that allowed me to removed distractions from photos. These apps meant that I could take and edit my photos on the one device. Below is an example of a shot taken on my phone and the edited image to show the difference.

Before

After

In this example I used HandyPhoto to remove the jetties sticking in at either side of the image and then I used Snapseed to add contrast and saturation. Once I realised that I could create images like this on my phone I was hooked.

Around this time I started to share the photos I was happy with on Facebook. Even from the start the feedback I got was very encouraging. I also discovered groups that had been set up for people to share the images they were creating on their iPhones. I was amazed to see the quality of images being posted. But even more amazing was the fact that I started to get invitations to show my photos at exhibitions all over the world.

I still remember the moment that I was contacted by the curator of an exhibition in Orange County in California who asked me would I allow the image above to be used as part of the show. I thought it was a scam. Who would want to show a photo I took on a bog with my phone in an art gallery half way around the world but I reckoned I had nothing to lose so I said yes. To my amazement the image sold on the night of the launch of the exhibition.

After that I started to get more and more invitations to show my iPhone photos at different shows. This photo which was taken on the grounds of a local castle was used as part of a show in Paris showcasing what people around the world were creating with their phones. By a happy coincidence the launch of the exhibition was the same night as my wife and I arrived in the city to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It has been one of the highlights of my photographic journey to date to see one of my photos on the wall of a Parisian gallery. I also got to meet some of the iPhone photographers that up to then I had only even know online. It was a night that I will remember for a ling time.

The invitations kept coming in and this image was part of a show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

And finally for now this image was one of the finalists of the MIRA Mobile Prize in Portugal. It was very humbling but also very encouraging to see the reaction that I was getting for photos that I had created on my phone. Even with all of the attention the photos attracted I still considered myself very much a beginner who had a huge amount to learn. I wasn't wrong. In fact even today I am still learning.

In future blogs I hope to not only talk about the next steps in my photographic journey but also include tutorials and work flows for my mobile photography and move on to discuss the different areas I work in as a professional photographer.