This photograph was taken with a phone.

Things sure have changed in our world in the last couple of years. Daily we Twitter, Twatter, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Faffr, whatever. All in efforts to stay apace with the world around us. Increasingly now by just using our phones. I know all too well that feeling of nakedness when I discover I’ve left my phone at home. This sympton has got worse with the advent of social networking and a mobile lifestyle that anyone can tune into if (A) you’re there and (B) if anyones gives a toss or not. Frankly I find it disturbing that I would be so disturbed by something so trivial as leaving my phone at home. Yet until I am ready to go live in the woods or deep in the Himalaya then these are the tools that are there for the taking. Or not. Photographers know this all too well. Go with it or not? I decided I was going to participate.

So it was last month at the beginning of June that I got my first smartphone (the brand I won’t mention because they already get plenty of free advertising from consumers like me). They might as well have surgically implanted that thing in the palm of my hand. You could have quoted me a year ago as saying that all I needed my phone to do was ring. Just bloody ring goddammit! (Mind you I still have to speak to my phone like this). Now I can’t even go anywhere without expecting it to get me there with the drop of a digital pin. It’s a long way I am from when I was a wee girl navigating from a paper map on a roadtrip round the skinny by-roads of Ireland. Me and me Da (gramatically incorrect I know but I don’t care, this is my blog) spinning around in his powder blu FIAT 131 singing a couple of rebel songs to ourselves.

One thing I have become infatuated with is the third rate mobile upload. They may have killed Polaroid but they gave us the Mobiloid. And what with all the tools out there you can do a way more inifinite number of things that just scratch or shake. But perhaps that was the charm? Just scratching and shaking. Don’t get me wrong I was devastated when they decided to kill SX70. I was well on my way to a nice body of SX70 work. Somebody else thought so too. We had a party here once a couple of years ago and I woke up the next morning to discover a wee gap in the line of polaroids on the picture rail. Somebody had nicked my favorite one of all, a silhouette against a beautiful dark blue sky of Ireland’s most famous Round Tower, Clonmacnoise.  Both my parents were with me that day as I shot in 2006. They were enthralled with the beauty of the polaroid as it revealed itself before their eyes. Everything about that day with my parents was precious. When I told them it was gone they were gutted. Whoever took that picture that night stole some of my special day too. Knacker.

How did I digress? The point of the post being the Mobiloid. For such a measly few pixels out of something I’m enjoying the limits of this scaled down version of a digital photograph. Photography still changes even when we think we’re done.

PS : A ‘Knacker’ roughly translates as a complete loser . Although that’s putting it politely. It’s a bit worse than that. I’m trying not to use profanities.