Long exposure iPhone images with Spectre

When I wus lad (he said, using his best cockney accent) there was a hair cream advert on TV that used the catch-phrase "I never thought I'd see the day..."

Fast forward forty years, and this phrase is playing over in my head as I sit to write this post.

I've written previously, probably many times in this very blog, about my dismissal of the iPhone (and mobile phones in general) as a 'serious' image capturing device. Nevermind that the weight of popular opinion would suggest otherwise. Flickr's 2017 data has the iPhone as the most used camera with 54% (over half) of the top 100 cameras used by photographers. Canon is next with 23%, and Nikon is 3rd with 18%.

Now granted, Flickr probably isn't the powerhouse photography app it used to be, and probably only a tiny fraction (if any) of those statistics relate to professional photographers. But still, it's a very impressive win for the iPhone in the 'every-day' photography category - which we all know makes up the bulk of today's plethora of image taking.

Does that mean, therefore, that my opinion of using an iPhone/mobile phone for photography has changed? Well yeah, it kinda does. And actually, it changed a couple of years ago when my daughter got her new iPhone 7Plus. The dual 12MP rear cameras (one 28mm wide and one 56mm telephoto) are capable of taking stunning photos. So much so, that the iPhone 7 was the 'camera' Emily used to create her Yr13 Photography portfolio.

I have an iPhone 6, with a 8MP rear facing single camera (about 30mm wide), so it's not as good (not surprisingly). In good light it's not terrible, but it's also no Canon 5D Mk4 (although neither is the iPhone 7 to be fair). Yet if we look at mobile phone companies like Huawei, who are partnering with Leica to produce a 40MP camera on their phones, then it's quite obvious that it's only going to get better and better. Will the camera phone seriously challenge the DSLR eventually? Probably.

Spectre iPhone app - an AI powered 'long exposure' app

Where am I going with all this? (Yes, for heaven's sake, get to the point man)! All that is to say that 'yes', I am using my iPhone more for taking photos (and certainly for capturing video). And a perfect case-in-point was just the other night when I went to my local camera club's monthly meeting. I was there to push (err, I mean discuss) my 'advanced' photography workshop running this weekend (as I write this). But it just so happened that this coincided with a hands-on practical session photographing dancers.

I didn't have my camera with me (big shot advanced photography teacher who doesn't bring a camera to a photography club gathering), but I did have my iPhone (of course). The lighting in the hall where the meeting was being held was tricky (some spotlighting, some dark shadows, some bright colours), so I decided to shoot long exposures on my iPhone using a recently acquired app - Spectre. Yeah, I know, sounds very cool - right? Very James Bond. And it is very cool - for an iPhone camera app.

Dancers. iPhone 6 with Spectre app. 3 second long exposure.

The app is actually designed to help you create long exposure shots of waterfalls and such so you can achieve that silky smooth smokey water effect or long light trail images. You can choose between 3, 5 and 9 second exposures, and can even get away with the 3 second exposures hand-held if there's enough light around. Pretty impressive in theory, but I'd never actually used it in practice.

At the Bar. iPhone 6 with Spectre app. 3 second long exposure

Because there definitely wasn't enough light around, I knew I was going to get a lot of blurring in the final images. So I chose a 3 second long exposure time and tried to use the blurring of the dancer's movements in my favour. Using the app was as simple as choosing the 3 seconds on the dial, pushing the shutter button, and watching while the image blur built up on the screen. Very cool.

If there was too much subject and camera movement, the final result was almost unrecognisable. But if I timed it so that there was a short period of static pose before movement, then the resulting image seemed to make more sense.

Twirling Dervishes. iPhone 6 with Spectre app. 3 second long exposure

I'm a huge fan of ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) photography, so this was right up my alley. I wasn't worrying about taking sharp, clear images - in fact just the opposite. If there was a lot of movement happening in front of me, then I just held the camera reasonably steady and captured the movement of the dancers. If the scene was more static, then I moved the phone itself to create the motion blur.

Ethereal Dancers. iPhone 6 with Spectre app. 3 second long exposure

I love this last image, especially converted to black and white. It has a beautifully spooky yet graceful quality to it. Could I have taken the same shot with my DLSR? Yes, of course I could. You might even argue that it would have been even better, since I would have had even more control over shutter speeds (you're limited to just the 3, 5 and 9 with Spectre). And yet, looking around the room at the other images taken that evening - all on DSLR's - there weren't any that looked quite like the ones I'd managed to capture on my iPhone using Spectre. There were some great images, don't get me wrong. But mostly they had gone for telephoto, close-cropped, sharp results. Everything I couldn't do on the iPhone 6, even if I'd wanted to.

Using Spectre on the iPhone was also just a whole heap of fun! Far too often we, as 'serious' photographers, disregard the fun factor. I know I do. The simplicity of whipping out your phone, clicking on an app, and creating beautiful images in seconds - with the minimal of fuss and gear - is also quite liberating and can't be stressed enough. It was actually being limited by the gear that I was using that forced me to think differently, and thereby craft images that I might not otherwise have considered taking.

So maybe it isn't the iPhone that's going to revolutionise photography or our images going forward? Maybe it's using the tools we have at our disposal and then thinking creatively, outside the box, to craft images that stand out from the crowd, no matter what we're using to create them with? Just a thought...