I'm Brendan O'Shea, I've been taking photographs with the iPhones since about 2012. When I'm
outside walking around I'm very sensitive to the photo opportunities that I'm framing
the scenes as I go. What I like to do is to get people in movement shots. At the time
that I go shooting with my regular DSLR camera I take the iPhone with me and sometimes I
find that I would use the iPhone much more than the DSLR. It's more enjoyable, it's
more instant, I think that allows you to process on the phone when you get something
and it works quite well like that. The things that inspire me, I suppose, like the main
thing that I get from photography is that I'm kind of a frustrated painter. I can't
paint, I can't draw to any degree of proficiency and that I find that the photography allows
me to express the creativity that I have in that line. I'm an English language teacher,
teacher trainer in a university college car. The things in photography that interest me
very much would be in distortion and blur and abstract images so that when I'm out
and about I'm trying to see what can be seen and how to see it and I've been trying since
then to post one iPhone shot and one DSLR shot on a daily basis and that it's challenging
but I enjoy the discipline of it and I'm lucky enough to get a lot of positive feedback
from contacts on Flickr and that. Last year I entered the Mobile Photography Awards, the
International Competition for Mobile Photography and I was lucky enough to get two photographs
and they got honourable mentions. I think there were 20 photographs chosen in each category
and I got one in the digital art section and I got one in the transport section. The technique
that I have again is very simple. I power up the phone, keep the phone pointed down,
turn it up, release very quickly and it blurs out the image. So what I do then is I open
up Snapseed and have the image here, bring it in and Snapseed has a number of controls
that you can mess around with on it. The one that I would work on is the tune image and
for brightness, bring the brightness up as far as it can go, bring the contrast up as
far as it goes and you see that we're isolating the image there. Then okay I done that, I'll
probably bring it in and crop it to get it as a square image which again will allow us
to probably crop out some of the parts that aren't white. Okay, there we are, like that.
So this is one that I like a lot, this is a shot that I, again, sometimes you have photographic
serendipity that shots appear in front of you and I was getting a plane, I think I was
going to Luxembourg last year and this is a Ryanair flight and the passengers were boarding
and it just appeared in front of you with the lens flare, giving the lines and giving
the symmetry to it and it's one that I like a lot, gave the title adventure. It was a
write-up on one of the online mobile photography websites for that. This one here is another
one that I have framed, again it goes back to 2012, 2012 I got quite a number of photographs
framed. This is a reflection of the River Lee, so the photograph has actually flipped,
it should be the other way around and that it's taken down in North, the North Mall and
again I like it because of the colours of the houses to reflect in there and you know
there's luck involved in all photography and it was lucky just at the timing that the guy
was in stride as he was going past and this bird overhead obliged as well to give nice
features and elements to photograph and that's one that I like a lot on the wall.
So this is a photograph titled photographic punctuation that I married with my job and
my hobby together there with language. I entered this for the Cork International Salon competition
that received interest from all over the world and that this one, a ribbon in the open section
and it's the style of photography that I do with my DSLR that I would again get people
in motion, blurring them out, I usually try to get a strong background behind them and
then do a little bit of post-processing work and the bokeh head or bubble heads or moon
heads, I've heard people refer to them different ways, just gives a little bit of anonymity
and interest to the scene. So this is one that's one they award.
