Since I am still shopping around for a Digital SLR camera, I decided to take my current camera, an iPhone 4S, and put it through it’s paces. While I do have another decent point and shoot camera, I hadn’t really tested the limits of the new iPhone camera. I have, however, heard a lot of good things about it, so I decided to put it to the test. Myself and a couple friends went to the town square in Collierville, Tennessee on a beautiful Saturday this past weekend. There are some nice old buildings as well as some rusty old trains there.

Overall I was very pleased. The only real complaint I had with the experience was the need to switch back and forth between 2 different camera apps depending on my needs. The default app is pretty good, and unlike my other camera app, shoots movies and takes HDR photos. The HDR capabilities were the one thing that kept bringing me back to it. However, my other camera app, Camera+, was definitely the clear winner between the two. The most important feature being the ability to focus on one part the shot while exposing for another. This is handled with a really great use of multi-touch. I would go as far as saying that the experience of adjusting the focus with one thumb while tweaking the exposure with the other thumb directly on the image is superior to the experience of using an SLR…if it weren’t for the fact that this involves covering most of the screen with your thumbs.

I’ve selected 30 photographs to upload to a flickr set. I’ve been trying to limit the number of photos I put in a set, forcing myself to act as curator as well as photographer. In doing so I am focusing on my best (or at least favorite) images as well as cutting down on redundancy. Hopefully this results in the sets being more enjoyable for the friends and relatives I force to look at them. I have also made a bit more progress in sifting through my old photos. The result being that I now have a set of images from my studio trip to Mexico as well.

Another month long hiatus from writing, but this time with a slightly better reason. I have accepted a full time architectural design position with a local firm called PKM Architects. Therfore much of my time of late is taken up by proprietary design work. This leaves both little time and limited content for a blog. I am none the less excited, both for my employment and for the future of my website. As I stated when I set up this website, my goals were two-fold. One was to establish an online portfolio and a presence for my work online. The second was to create an outlet for my own explorations and intrests. I now feel that I can finally shift the emphasis from the former goal to the latter, which is by far the more interesting of the two.

When taking stock of my so called “other intrests”, I still find photography towards the top of the list. Unfortunately it is not one that I have pursued very seriously as of late. That is something that I intend to change very soon, cheifly with a long overdue upgrade of equipment. While the 8mp camera on my iPhone is indeed pretty impressive, I really need a digital SLR to replace my old film camera. This will actually be pretty critical going forward as I no longer have access to a dark room (also it is the year 2012).

With this incoming multitude of new images, I will need a good way to share them here. WordPress does have a built in gallery feature, and it doesn’t look too bad. However, like most things wordpress, it is pretty inflexible. So, in another experiment with a free media service, I have set up a flickr account. I’ll admit that I had hoped to avoid having content scattered across half a dozen different websites, but the more I see what people are doing with these sites, the more I see why they do it. So to get started, I am going through some of my recent photographs and uploading some that catch my eye. My first two sets are from my trips to London and Barcelona as part of a research studio with Cecil Balmond and Roland Snooks: London 2010, Barcelona 2010