I’ve recently been getting into photography, thanks to my girlfriend who bought me an old Holga camera. Which uses film (gasp!). There’s something about the mystery of not being able to see your photo until you’ve had it developed that makes the experience much more interesting, exciting even. It means that good photos you take have real value. And what’s more interesting is that despite having had a Nokia N93i for a few weeks now, I’ve only actually taken about 10 photos with it, and one video. It just wasn’t fun, and I didn’t feel particularly creative or inspired.
So when I opened the Metro the other morning and saw some amazing panoramic photos staring back at me I quickly read how they’d been achieved. And was p**sed off! ‘Cos they were done on a blimmin’ Nokia N95 (by a photographer called Henry Reichhold).
As someone just getting into photography with film, to see someone achieving such great shots using a phone put the wind up me a little bit, and when I think about why that is, I guess its just jealousy and an automatic internal resistence to technology replacing something that works perfectly well as it is. Which is odd, because I’ve been using a laptop to DJ for a while now (which is going to annoy any vinyl DJ’s reading this).
What I’d love to see (and experience) is Nokia educating and enabling me to do something similar; to use this technology they’ve given me to express myself other than taking ’snapshots’. I guess it would be like the talks and demonstrations that Apple do intore, but you’d have to bring it to me - Nokia isn’t quite Apple yet for me to travel to them.
For more on Henry Reichhold, check out the Connected World exhibition, running from the end of October at the Royal Albert Hall, or visiti Nokia Island in Second Life.