Geared Up

There’s more to black-and-white photography than simply a lack of color. Maybe we wouldn’t feel this way if the first photographs were made in color but that didn’t happen and I grew up admiring the works of W. Eugene Smith and other photojournalists who photographed people at work, play, or being themselves in glorious black and white.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officially refers to quadcopters as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) but they obviously have more in common with the kind of hobbyist’s radio-controlled aircraft that have been around since I was a member of the Poly Aeroneers in high school. Yet tech blogs and social media endlessly refer to quadcopters as “drones” when the only thing a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and a DJI Phantom 1 have in common is that they’re capable of flight. But they’re not without some controversy.

Everybody makes prints from their digital image files—everybody. It may just be cranking out a few photo prints from a birthday party on a kiosk at Walgreens, or wedding photographers having full albums printed at commercial labs, but contrary to some pundits who claim digital has destroyed the need for a physical print, they are still being made and enjoyed. As Mark Twain once said, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”

Mobile is an adjective often used to describe photography made with smartphones but I can put a tiny Panasonic Lumix GM1 in my pocket and take a walk—mobilize, if you will—as easily as my iPhone and shoot some nice photos. Instead, let’s call it what it really is: Smartphone Photography.