Capturing black and white nature photography on iphone smartphone

When you are out and about, or on holiday, do you take pictures of things you find inspiring? I am always a little torn between wanting to take snippets of inspiration and also wanting to be in the moment. Many is the time with my son that I have captured the moment digitally but not seen through human eye. I’m always a little jealous of my husband who gets to watch things happen in real time with our son whilst I record the momento through the lens. But if you get pleasure from looking at pictures and objects, which I certainly do more than my husband, the payoff is worth the sacrifice of being truly in the moment.

Since I started blogging 8 and a half years ago I have captured so many things out and about in my city, at design shows, off the beaten track on holidays, and it has helped me hone my eye to the details I find inspiring, to cut out the noise and focus on elements that attract me. This is a really useful skill in interior decorating, helping you to see detail whilst cutting away distraction within a brief.

What I have found myself photographing more and more are small studies of flowers and foliage. Mirroring my love for nature in the home, what started as the practical task of spotting bits of foliage out on walks that could be used in the various dried flower arrangements I have around the home, became a part of the language of seeing, when a piece may not have been suitable to forage but which I wanted to capture, I started to learn how to quickly frame and capture the essence of my subject. I have been editing pictures taken of nature over the last year to create some simple cards to send to friends which add a really lovely personal touch, but they are suitable for many uses (the Iris’s you see below are currently an A3 print adorning my home office space). I am pretty amazed with the results of what can be captured on your phone with a just quick snap and some simple post-shot-edits.

Photographic technology on all phones has really moved forward in the last few years and it’s now possible to capture, in settings like portrait mode, something you would traditionally have needed a camera that costs tens of thousands of pounds to achieve. That’s not to say professional photography is redundant, far from it, but unless you are shooting for something professional, the naked eye really can’t see those pixels that blur when blown up.

The shots I take are always rough colour shots which I then edit on Snapseed (since it’s on my phone and very simple to use). I’ve been pleased with how they have turned out using various black and white filters and a combination of vignette or lens blur functions to add focus or depth of field. I wondered if I may post a guide to the editing app I use, but, unlike photoshop which I use for work, I find this app so intuitive, and also fun to play around on, that I wasn’t sure it would be useful.

I thought I would post some of my favourites today as a memento of the beauty you can capture ad-hoc with a mobile phone and some simple edits. There is a range of shots, from those that are wild and foliage-dense, to the more detailed studies of single stems (both left over from floral arrangements and dried). These are all decent enough quality to be blown up, in I have done so with several, it’s a great inexpensive way of adding art inspiration to your space that feels unique.