Smart Toys

Beside readiness to use, the good point of carrying a smartphone always with you is that from time to time you have the chance to get unplanned and unexpected results, whatever its nominal quality is. The number of flawed shots grows tremendously high but it feels like having a old plastic toycam, a Holga, a Diana, always in your pocket. In the end, the exciting part of this game is being able to pull the best out of it and, believe me, in these cases PS and Gimp don't help so much.

A la decouverte ...

Warning: all pictures below are taken with my not-smart-at-all-mobile cam. Watching at them can seriously affect your opinion about me.

The cold season, according to those working at the forecast offices, will soon knock at our doors. Last Summer has undeniably been too long: this is supported by statistics on recent years' observations. The Italians say: "There are no longer mid seasons" (things are no longer what they used to be). As a matter of fact, transition from Summer to Winter and vice versa looks like being stepwise. Everything happens from one day to another.

I think that our contemporary digitalized (quantized) perception of the events happening around us has irreversibly changed. Having grown old in the artificial, conditioned (thermally equalized) atmosphere of our offices, we have lost the ancestral capability to appreciate the little daily changes during season shifts. Now it's all either too cold or too hot.

It won't probably be the root cause but also for such, pressed by the media driven meteorological psychosis, I feel more than ever before the urge to exploit all opportunities for making quick tours on my mountain bike: alone or with my closest young "collaborator". Once again, my cranky mobile cam has been an invaluable tool, which I can't make without, for exploring and making experiments while pedaling.

Milan Fog

I've unearthed these pictures, that I took with my old mobile phone some years ago, while looking of something else I can't remember anymore. The weather is changing as far as we go on with the Autumn season. In few days we shall have heavy fog and everything will look like different. So our mood will be.

Mine is already foggy and gloom, but there are different reasons behind.

An Hungarian friend

My not-at-all-smart phone cam strikes again. I found this little moth hanging on my the curtains of my hotel room, one of the last times I was in Budapest. Now that the company spending restrictions are keeping me anchored in the harbour, I have less opportunities to shoot abroad but much more time, in turn, to delve into the folders of my previous shootings, including the very bad images taken with my phone.

It's marvellous to find out some good shots, worth of being processed and published in the folders of a phone cam. Sometimes, less than one million pixels can surprise more than the fifteeen megapixels of the bulky, heavy and expensive high-end companions.

Different life-styles

Two snapshots taken in Milan on the same day with my crippling mobile cam.

Low Q, Hi Fi

I'm reporting here a short series with words I published on 591 few days ago. It's all about images quality and the message laying underneat.

On the importance of the apparently insignificant

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wished to have your gears at your side but you couldn’t rely on any other real means for fixing the picture in front of you than your eyes, an unsharpened pencil (and the backside of a business card) or, in the most favourable cases, your no-more-last-generation mobile phone?

Yes, your mobile, that small buzzing thing slipped into your inner jacket pocket that’s able to take images of questionable quality like the first digital consumer cameras did ten years ago.

I remember my first “light capturing device” was a Kodak that was sold to me as able to deliver “up to” one million pixels. With some elementary maths I foresaw I could have printed high quality images up to 3”x4”, just like the dimension of an instant camera prints.

Today things have sensibly changed and that “up to” has turned into “no more” and low-end products have widely outclassed those numbers. As a matter of fact, my bruised three years old mobile phone has a small hole on his back resembling the stenopeic aperture of a pinhole cam and its images quality is no better than that of my old Kodak was able to grant. Feels just like ten years haven’t passed.

Last Christmas I unsuccessfully tried to switch that machinery on. So I left that “toy” to my son, to let him play and act like he’s always seen his father to do.

Bad exposure, few pixels, unclear aims resulting into ephemeral images. Yet, in some cases when I’m travelling, at work or in some other “controlled” environment I can’t stop myself by picking this small thing out, turn myself to the subject and press the shutter button while I mimic as if I was dialling an SMS, looking up for a number or simply checking for unanswered calls.

And when I put my phone back in my pocket I wonder: what was it necessary for? Was it just to have in turn some images that are worst than al old Polaroid left going mouldy for years in a basement?

I don’t know. I can’t answer. In most cases I just can’t avoid to take pictures and store them as if they had the same dignity of their descendants taken with the latest digital reflex. There must be for sure a psycho-therapeutic reason behind, but this is not convincing me at all.

Now I should find a way to share and let other people to feel and appreciate what I can perceive from these kinds of imperfectly-born documents: spontaneity and immediacy of these frozen in time events; surprise, ingenuity and intimacy of unaware subjects. Could these values ever be sufficient to balance the poor quality of what I’m holding now in my hands?

Photos © Tiberio Fanti

P.S. All images were taken with a "can't-remember" mobile cam.