Hello, my name is Brad Connell (@fauxjebus on twitter & instagram). I’m 28 Years old and I work as an Art Director at an advertising/design agency called WAX in Calgary, Alberta Canada. I got my iPhone4 last October and although I was the last person I know to get one, it was my first smartphone. Prior to that I was using a Samsung flip phone from the turn of the century and a Nikon Coolpix S6.
I discovered Instagram a few days after it launched and it was love at first use. Instagram quickly became the last step for pretty much every picture I take on my iPhone that I like and want to share. So for me Instagram and iPhoneography are totally intertwined. The apps I use most often are:
Camera+ for contrast, tone, colour, rotation and cropping.
Pro HDR for still life or landscapes.
Diptic for making diptics.
PS Express to rotate, straighten, flip, or adjust contrast and saturation.
Genuis Scan to straighten out perspective and other parallel lines.
AutoStitch and Photosynth for panoramas.
Juxtaposer for combining 2 images with a simple layer mask.
TouchRetouch for cloning.
TiltShiftGen for blurs (which I still prefer to Instagram’s built-in blurs), saturation, contrast and vignettes.
Tiny Planet Photos for making things circular.
Decim8 for screwing around with glitch style.
and Postagram for turning Instagrams into postcards.
The first picture I will talk about is the blurry self portrait at the top of this post. It was for @assignm3nt on Instagram, who would post things like this:
and then over the next few days people submit photos that feature blurs until the next assignment is given. I believe @assignm3nt is on hiatus right now but there are other similar photo inspiration/challenge things going on. @dailyshoot on twitter is another. I highly suggest checking one out; you’ll be surprised at how adding one simple random constraint to your perspective inspires creativity and you end up with shots that you would never have conceived otherwise. And then you have a new trick in your photography bag. Anyway, for this particular challenge I chose to do a self portrait. So I took a bunch of pictures in my bathroom against the wall while I whipped my face around to create blur. I shot with the front-facing (crappy) camera on my iPhone4 to get a even more distorted image.
I ended up liking a few of them so I made a diptic of my top 4 selects.
I was going to post that but then my eye just kept gravitating toward the bottom right corner. I tried putting that one by itself through Instagram and really liked the way the Sutro filter desaturated the yellow and shifted the tones to pinks and browns, so that’s what I went with.
