Photo experimentation in South Korea

Riding Seoul’s Subway line 2 in January 2012. I think of Line 2 as the Green Line because this is its color on the Seoul subway map.

I didn’t imagine that owning an iPhone would change the way I photograph.

Pre-iPhone, I carried one of my big pro cameras with me everywhere. Bringing my 5D Mark II to a birthday party or a friend’s barbecue automatically put me in “professional photographer mode.” Every picture had to be perfectly composed, in perfect light, at the perfect time. I photographed many memorable moments but wasn’t really in the moment.

A couple years ago I bought a Canon G11, a small point-and-shoot camera. Since this wasn’t a professional camera, I thought I wouldn’t feel compelled to make perfect pictures with it. I would photograph on program mode, let the camera control everything. Wrong.

Last year I bought an iPhone. I didn’t give a thought to the phone’s camera, which it turns out produces pictures that are as high-quality as the ones that came out of my first digital SLR (the Canon 10D, for you gear geeks out there). I love the iPhone camera. I have almost no control over the exposure settings. Turns out this was what I needed to set me free. Now I’m more experimental. I make more photographs. I still think about composition, light and moment; I think it would be impossible for me not to think about those. But I don’t obsess over them. I just let the pictures happen and I’m more willing to make mistakes.

Thanks, iPhone.

A fake parachutist hangs over a temporary children’s exhibit at the Korean War Memorial museum in Seoul.

Bicycles rent for 3,000 won (about $3) per hour at Yeouido Park in Seoul.

Bus reflection in Seoul.

Riding the bus from Sokcho, on South Korea’s far northeastern coast, to Daegu, I took this picture where everything seems to bend toward the center of the photograph. I still can’t figure out what happened but I like the effect.