I’ve come to appreciate the iPhone a lot, especially as a photographic tool. To be honest, however, this particular journey of appreciation started with Android and the Samsung Galaxy S4. That’s when I began to appreciate the general use of smartphones with my Olympus E-M10 camera. Up to that point I’d resisted using the S4 at all because of the disappointing results I kept getting when using the S4’s camera. But when I began to use the S4 as a post processing platform for the Olympus E-M10 I began to see how important the smartphone could truly be. With the ability to move JPEG images off the E-M10 wirelessly, post process them, and then move them up to Flickr, Twittr, or some other external platform wirelessly (I absolutely refuse to use the word cloud), that helped readjust my attitude positively about the smartphone.

Enter the iPhone. One key driver to purchase the iPhone 6s was the quality of the camera of the iPhone 6. And based on my experience the iPhone’s camera is superb. When I substitute the iPhone 6’s camera with the Olympus, all else being equal, I have the wonderful ability to create photographs with just one platform and get the results out quickly and easily. Even with the Olympus, it’s still a far more compact, faster, processing platform than any personal computer.

Photographic applications that I’ve used so far, on both iOS and Android, have been OI.Share, Snapseed, and VSCO. My use of VSCO has fallen considerably over the past year. On just the iOS platform I’ve used Stackables and Formulas and especially Pixelmator. Pixelmator was the tool I first used when I purchase the iPad Air 2 over a year ago, but as time as progressed my use of Pixelmator has lessoned quite a bit. And that’s a shame, really, as I liked how Pixelmator works. The big difference is that I’m using the iPhone for far more photography support work and not so much the iPad. Perhaps I need to start using Pixelmator on the iPhone.

One thing that has dropped precipitously is my use of Adobe Lightroom. I still pull the Lightroom system out on occasion when I need to work with a difficult exposure. That’s why I’m still producing both JPEG and RAW for each photo with my Olympus. And I will use Lightroom to pull all the exposures off my cards to store and categorise them. Before I started using smartphones as heavily as I do now I was using Lightroom and getting too wrapped up in the complexities of technique. If you do that in Lightroom it can become a slow burden that begins to suck the fun out of photography. That’s why I’m doing most of my work with the iPhone.

I’m having a lot of fun again.