Originally published at http://www.wired.co.uk
by David Rowan
Last October, New York Times
photographer Damon Winter was travelling around the
Taliban-held village of Nahr-i-Sufi, in northern Afghanistan, with Delta Company, First Battalion of the US Army's 87th Infantry Regiment. It was a six-day mission for the soldiers, and Winter wanted to document every moment of their routine, from patrolling and firefighting to guard duty and down time. There's always a lot of down time. "We had seen missions like this before," says Winter, who is 36. "Everything started to become quite monotonous." So alongside shooting stills and video with his regular Canon
EOS 5D Mark II camera, he also snapped more candid photos with his iPhone, "kind of as a joke".
To take the shots Winter used a paid-for app called Hipstamatic, which squeezes pictures through a set of filters to imitate the lo-fi images produced by vintage, analogue cameras such as Holgas. As Winter's story shaped up, its focus became the more humdrum side of war -- and running the Hipstamatic photos seemed the best option. "I wanted something casual-looking, a little more granular," he says. "Something that captured the mood of the story." In November the pictures were printed in the New York Times; three months later, the images bagged third prize in the Pictures of the Year International photojournalism competition.
That's saying something. Just five years ago, mobile phone photos were a low-grade, blurry affair with washy colours and a fisheye perspective. But with better image processing, greater storage space, and high-quality light sensors, handsets are capable of creating much richer images. That makes good photography more portable -- if you're trekking through Yosemite, say, you don't have to schlep a heavy SLR up and down hills in the baking sun. And apps such as Hipstamatic (or equivalents such as CameraBag) replace bulky special flashes, filters or different films. What's more, you're likely to take pictures in places where you'd not otherwise whip out your camera -- perhaps in a restaurant.
Still, sometimes you might want higher quality images -- the iPhone's not going to cut it on your honeymoon. But traditional digital photography presents two problems: pictures sit locked in your camera for months before you get round to downloading them, and until you do you can't share your photos online. Enter
Eye-Fi. This card slots into you camera like any other, but it doesn't just store pictures -- it can also connect your camera wirelessly to the internet. Once configured to access your home wifi network, it will automatically send pictures to your computer or straight to a social media site like
Facebook or
Flickr. The upshot? You're only ever organising small batches of pictures, as opposed to wading through a baggy 700-image set of various holiday snaps. And the card can also be set to erase downloaded images as its memory fills up. "You effectively never run out of space," says Simon Faulkner, Eye-Fi's 49-year-old business director. "So you never need to get to the point where you're going on a trip, sitting on the plane, having to delete photos that you don't want to delete."
But that's not all. A new feature called Direct Mode, on Eye-Fi's premium cards, lets your camera connect to your smartphone wirelessly, even when out of range of a wireless network. Once on your phone, you can upload images to the web -- even on a beach. "It allows people to [instantly] share their photos in full resolution," says Faulkner. "We're taking the compromises away."
David Rowan is editor of Wired magazine
