I recovered these from my Samsung S4 tonight, after VSCO Cam had undergone at least two updates. These were actually some of the first photos I made while in Kansas, in Leavenworth, next to the Missouri River, while there was still snow on the ground from the earlier storms. I was excited to get these, and I liked the VSCO treatment on them. When I got back to the hotel room that evening, my excitement evaporated in the face of an obstinate phone and application that refused to give me the images. In particular the images were rotated 90 degrees to the right, and the phone/software refused to allow me to rotate them back. Unlike the majority of smartphone photographers I do know how to use the phone/camera in landscape mode. And one other note, it’s in 4:3rds aspect ratio, to match what I get from my Olympus and Panasonic cameras.

When I finally gave up trying to unload my camera photos I tweeted that the experiment with the smartphone had ended. And for the time it had. I went on to concentrate using just the E-M5 and the two primes I’d brought with me, the Panasonic 25mm and the Olympus 45mm. I got what I consider a lot of good photos out of that combination.

Then today I got a email from VSCO about four more new “analogue” effects, all for free. I love free. I downloaded them, then thought maybe I should give the S4/VSCO combo another go. And then I found these photos still on the phone. I went back in and discovered I could rotate them back to normal view, and then pulled them off the S4 and on my notebook. They’re now up on my Flickr stream.

It’s hard to pick an individual favorite. But if I had to, it would probably be the third, “train wreck.” Except they were all taken together, and trying to break them up just won’t work. They were taken at the same time of the evening, on the same day, in the same evening cold. That deep, deep Kansas cold.

Now that the combination of smartphone and software are behaving again, I’ll probably give it another go. But just as I’m not one to suffer fools gladly, neither am I one to suffer screwy tools either. And I’m speaking more of the smartphone than I am of VSCO Cam. I can certainly see the creative potential of the two together, but I consider the camera on the Galaxy S4 to be almost fatally flawed. What pulls me back to trying again is VSCO Cam.