Valerie Ardini, iPhoneographer
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 9:40PM | Valerie Ardini "I'd like to welcome Valerie Ardini to the iPhoneography blog. Valerie has offered to write for the blog from time to time, so keep an eye out for future posts from this very talented and inspiring iPhoneographer. For those of you who don't know Valerie, or want to know more, then read on" - Glyn Evans, founder & editor of the iPhoneography blog.
So who am I, and where am I from?
My name is Valerie Ardini. I was born in Italy (hence the last name) but I have been living in The Netherlands since I was 2 years old. I currently live and work in Deventer, a small town not far from.. well, any other city here actually, as The Netherlands are fairly small to begin with!
What do I do?
Photography has been a passion of mine since I was in high school. I worked in photo stores, spending most of my salary on buying film and developing my photos before I decided to go the Academy of Arts where I graduated in 2006, at the Media Art Department. At that time I was mostly working with video but I quickly went back to photography after my graduation.
At the moment I’m working as a commercial photographer. My work consists of architectural and interior photography, some general commercial photography for (small) businesses and product photography.
Besides commercial work I am working on various autonomous projects, from analog photography projects, Polaroid photography, street photography, themed/ conceptual projects, to iPhone365 projects. Sometimes I make drawings, and I’m slowly getting back into video again.
So how did I first become interested in iPhoneography, and how long have I been shooting with an iPhone?
In april of 2009 I read a blog post by Chase Jarvis. (if you don’t know who I am talking about, he’s a big name in commercial photography and an avid iPhone photographer, be sure to look him up.) He was using his iPhone to capture moments, ideas and wrote about the importance of taking photos everywhere, all the time- and how the best camera is the one that’s with you (which has of course been said by others as well)
I happened to be feeling stuck and uninspired at the moment, feeling I couldn’t improve, couldn’t take certain pictures because I missed certain equipment. A foolish thought, but one that has plagued so many photographers (and will keep plaguing many more). We always think gear. But we forget the most important thing- ourselves; we make the image. Sure, the gear we use has an impact, enables us to do certain things, to capture the things we visualize the way we visualize them; but in the end, we have to see the gear as a tool- and sure, some tools are better for certain purposes than others, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything without certain tools and it doesn’t mean we should dismiss a certain tool because it ‘isn’t good enough’ - or worship another because it’s from a certain brand, for that matter.
So I had one of those eye-opening ‘aha!’ moments.. and I started shooting with my iPhone (a 3G at the time), every day. Not long afterwards I discovered some people were doing 365 projects with their iPhones, and I just ‘jumped in’. It has enabled me to let go of the paralyzing thoughts about what photography is, in general- it’s not pixels, or grain, lenses or bodies. I’m no longer blaming the equipment I do or don’t have and I started enjoying taking photos again. I no longer felt like I was stuck creatively.
I am now on my second iPhone365 project. The first one is a bit of a random collection of images, I was trying to prove to myself I could take good photos with any equipment. In my second 365 I decided to choose the iPhone as the tool again; this time I am focussing on taking a photo that’s meaningful to the specific day, and I’m restricting myself to black and white square photos. I’m working with a few themes in the project as well; portraits and street photography.
When I had decided upon using solely black and white photos for my 365 project, I searched for an app I could use on a daily basis, one that would fit all my needs. I really wanted an app that had the option to mimic filters- red, yellow, orange, green and blue filters (using a red filter (on your lens when using a black and white film) on a portrait will make a face very light because the red light gets filtered out; a green filter will give the portrait much more 'character', you'll see it used more on old people with beautiful wrinkly faces for example. A blue filter would filter out blue light and make the sky in a landscape appear white, etc.) Being able to use or in this case, mimic these filters gives you much more flexibility and control over a monochrome image, as certain contrasting colours will just blend into each other when conversed to graytones.
It wasn't easy finding an app that had this option together with the other options I really wanted- cropping (for the squares), good levels or curves controls, a simple black border option.
A few people pointed out Filterstorm and I really liked the possibilities this app had. It's a seriously powerful app for the iPhone. While it does not have the filter options I wanted, I found it to be the app that had everything else and it offered very precise control. So I started my iPhone365 using that app and because I wanted everything to look consistent, I stuck with it. I'm still hoping they'll add 'filters' in a future update- and a more convenient cropping tool.
For more of my photography, please see http://ardini.nl or http://iphoneography.nl, and don't forget to look out for my future posts here on the iPhoneography blog - Valerie.
Reader Comments (11)
You have some great photos here and your writing style is wonderful. Looking forward to more posts in the future! Are you also on Flickr?
Additionally;
@Bow Street Whiskey: wow, thanks for noticing. I have switched hosting providers and the image links were incorrect in some blogs and pages. I thought I had fixed that everywhere but had no idea this entire page was affected as well. I'm sorry, I'll fix it soon- but will have to do it image for image on both the Dutch and the English page ( :O ) so it's going to take some time ;)
I am having issues with my iphoneography site as well, it doesn't display correctly on an iPhone (the irony) or iPad. A lot of fixing and so little time..
@Ivan Sciupac: Yes I am, although I have to admit I'm not very active on flickr (sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not)! You can find me pretty much everywhere under my 'nickname' falleri.
@Grey: Oops. I was a little too hasty there. You are absolutely right. I'm the kind of person who learns how things work, then remembers the important part and manages to forget the exact technical reasoning behind it (with some things)- which usually isn't a problem because I know what I need to know- until I want to reproduce the info for others of course :) I should have rechecked that. I'll ask if I can edit that part asap. Not such a good thing giving the wrong kind of information..
Love the article and the pics. I'm a recent convert to iPhoneography and am loving using my iPhone to create images.
I've been checking out Filterstorm recently and think I may start to use it now. There are just so many great photo editing apps for he the iPhone it's hard to not not just buy them all ;-)
Anyway, welcome to the forum and I look forward to reading your articles.
Robbie
Dublin, Ireland.