EYE // PHONE.

EYE // PHONE.

a casual guide to developing an eye for elevated phone photography

“An eye for elevated phone photography is an asset worth developing. It might come in handy for a job or for personal branding, for capturing moments in a true-to-experience form, and best of all, for its perspective-altering potential. What’s more, cultivating this skill can get you to a place where you regularly and instinctively locate all the beautiful and exceptional elements in your everyday life with profound appreciation and gratitude. It’s a tool with great practical and emotional return. Who wouldn’t love to see more beauty in our lives, and get the most out of every memory we document? It begins with developing a photographer’s eye.”

Hit the link below to read our latest free resource on casual photography:

My Top Photo Editing Apps

Afterlight

Cost: free, with no real need to buy upgrades

Why I love it: Afterlight is easily the most powerful of the editing apps I have on my phone, giving the user the capability to overlay light and color (like in Photoshop), control space-bounded edits with a fingertip, apply color shift, and even mimic a film double exposure. The range of available free filters is wide, adjustable, and elegant.

What could be better: I wish this app could store images and recent edits the way VSCO can, rather than require the user to find and re-import an image every time.

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VSCO

Cost: free, with no real need to buy upgrades

Why I love it: this platform has something of a cool-kid appeal, with its minimal interface, built-in social sharing network (which I personally don’t use), and filters that skew trendy rather than classic. One particularly cool feature is its ability to “hold” your photos in an in-app space called the Studio, where your edits are preserved and where your images will stay, even if the originally uploaded photo is deleted from your phone.

What could be better: this app would benefit from a serious cleanup of its filter options - with so many filters having fundamentally the same look, all the redundant options are an absolute slog to get through.

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Snapseed

Cost: free

Why I love it: Snapseed boasts a wider range of editing categories than other apps, including some I don’t find particularly useful but are kind of neat to have (like “Retrolux” and “Grunge”…whatever those are). By far the coolest tool in the app is the “Tune” function, which makes use of a unique vertical vs. horizontal slider configuration to let you very intuitively change your brightness, saturation, warmth, etc.

What could be better: many of this app’s default effects are way too extreme and tough to control, and therefore not great baseline “presets” for a casual editor to be working from.

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Canva: Graphic Design Creator

Cost: free, with no real need to buy upgrades

Why I love it: halfway decent photo editing apps are now a dime a dozen, but it’s still uncommon to find a solid tool that does what Canva can: generate logos and flyers right on your phone. I frequently recommend Canva to friends who run blogs or small businesses, as it’s a quick-and-easy substitute for a larger program like Photoshop or Publisher. Plus, it’s well plugged into current visual trends in terms of fonts, layouts, and “stickers,”, etc.

What could be better: Canva might be too user-friendly—it doesn’t really nudge the user to get inventive with templates. This results in many users creating and sharing only slightly different versions of the same graphic.

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A Color Story

Cost: free to download, but leans heavily on in-app purchases

Why I love it: I fully admit I first learned about A Color Story from Taylor Swift, who started using its “color fog” features on photos during the Lover album release timeline. Indeed, color fogs and light effects are ACS’s strong suit - somehow they look softer and more palatable in this app than in others.

What could be better: the filters are not wonderful and not very refined, and most of the app’s features are behind a paywall (I wouldn’t recommend adding them).

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You might be living in an early 20th century British novel if...

Throwin’ it back to a Blenheim Palace visit in 2013.

• Everything was much better before The War

• You use four different nicknames daily for "Charles," and they're all for the same guy

• Someone you know would lay down their life for a cold, inconvenient, and uncomfortable middle-of-nowhere house

• Your local spunky unmarried 30-something woman looks like Emma Thompson

• Your friend has confided in you that he can't possibly leave his cheating spouse, he’s an upstanding Englishman!

• You’ve experienced extreme drama surrounding unsent or misinterpreted letters

Oxford, 2013.

• Nanny still lives in the attic 47 years later and will show off your baby photos if you ask

• You have a vague perception of Catholics as being kinda weird

• Someone is the black sheep of your family solely because they married the wrong person

• At one point you have regaled a friend with everything you know about a particular man. But you are definitely not in love with him, oh no. You think about him 24/7 but you are not in love with him and have never been. Also you have no other memories from the past decade that don't involve this man that you are absolutely not in love with

• Papa says England must be falling because women have jobs and opinions now

• You’re reliably very, very surprised when you run into a neighbor-slash-relative...in your tiny town...at a family event! Small world

• Your family friend Edmund is a commoner, but he's allowed to party on our veranda because man, can he write 

• A symbolic Big Tree grows on the grounds of your family home

• They're tearing down your ancient house to build flats, what a pity 

• It's been a while since you’ve heard from your distant relative in India or the Levant

• You’re certain the butler can't feel love, he exists just to butler

• People who didn’t go to Oxford don't count  

• Is your nickname derisive or affectionate? You genuinely do not know

• Mama is lying down on account of her nerves and migraines; please don't make noise in the corridors

• You’ve considered running away to Switzerland to ride out a wave of drama and gossip in style

• You know cousin Victoria is capital-R Rebelling, because she wants to marry an American 

• There's a new baby in the family but you never see it and rarely mention its name