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I'm a strong believer in the idea of shoot with the camera you have. Essentially instead of always bemoaning the idea you can't make good photographic shots because your real camera is back at home or not there, I believe you should shoot with anything you have. This includes your phone.

There are so many benefits for embracing this. Not the least is you'll have shots in your albums when otherwise you'd be at home wishing you had shots. You'll at least have something to work with vs nothing at all.

Another neat idea when shooting this way is you can develop a really unique style with the advent of modern technology. When previousy all images pretty much looked the same as perfectly exposed and clear as a bell, things have changed. Nowadays, you can have your images look almost as good or as poor--poor for artistic purposes--as you may like.

This last is all digital manipulation. If you're like me you can get this done after the fact through post processing. This works by taking you perfect image using your camera of choice--for me my grab camera is a Canon G12--then capturing the image. After you import your image you can manipulate it as you need to get your final version.

There's a lot of power and decisions to make when the whole world of digital manipulation is at your finger tips. And, that's not always a good thing.

The other technique is use an app on your phone that will apply the corrections almost as you push the trigger. This means you make all your adjustments prior to shooting. But, as soon as you shoot, those manipulations are fixed. There aren't any other changes you can make, done, finite, complete, no more changes.

Why would anyone sign up to such inflexibility? Well, there's a good reason and it's called visualization.

The idea here is to make images when you shoot that will be as final as possible. You develop a good set of visualization skills, you world is your oyster. If you can shoot to a final product when you press the trigger there are many added benefits. Not the least of these is you start to see how easy it is to make compelling images with a good minds eye to guide you.

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Here's the whole thing. Whether you're shootig and adjusting with your camera or waiting until you get to your computer the idea is not to do every weird or unusual image processing technique on your images. Consistency is a big feature for people to appreciate your photography. When you're consistent you might say you've developed a style that's unique to yourself. That is wonderfully important and it's really what separates one photographer from the other.

You see, anyone can just about make perfectly exposed images every single time. Doing that, however, doesn't help the viewer to distinguish your images from anyone else.

The point here is to take advantage of today's technology to process your images and to develop a style unique to yourself.

Cheers

Tom

PS - both images in this blog were shot with my Canon G12 and modified on my iPad using The Camera+ app.