Barna, Co. Galway, by iPhone

I got to spend a night in the beautiful little village of Barna, which is just outside Galway city on the way to Connemara. It was a beautiful evening and the sun was going down over the picturesque town and it’s harbour. While I wasn’t there specifically to take pictures, I did of course have a camera with me. My Fuji X-E1 was in my bag and I took it out to go and get some pictures of the harbour and the beach overlooking the atlantic. As I went to check that the camera was working before leaving the hotel, I realised that in my haste leaving earlier I had forgotten to put a memory card in the camera. To say I was annoyed with my self was something of an understatement. Normally, I would just go and buy a card, but there didn’t seem to be any for sale anywhere in the village. Luckily I did have my iPhone with me however. I used my favourite VSCO Cam app to get some pictures so that I at least had something. I got some nice shots, but I’m still raging about the incident.

I know there are a lot of people out there that use the iPhone as their primary camera, and I’ve tried several times to go out shooting with just my iPhone, but I always run into the same issue. Using the camera a lot, even for a short period, absolutely kills the battery on the iPhone. If you’re using other apps, this can be even more the case. I didn’t even take that many photos and my battery was nearly dead. The other problem with running your battery down taking photos, is that at the end of the day, it’s still your phone, so if you go around shooting photos for a period, and then your battery dies, you’re now without a camera and a phone. I get that you can bring external batteries or one of those portable chargers, but then you might as well just have a compact camera with you. I’ve always found that to be a big issue. I’m curious to hear from anyone who does use their iPhone as their primary photographic tool, how they get around the battery life issue?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about the iPhone (or other camera phones) as photographic tool, as it got me out of a pickle, and I know lots of people have been made famous for their iPhone photography.

One of the other things that I tried on this occasion, was to use the recently announced Lightroom for iPhone as a way to sync my photos back to Lightroom. In the past, I would always just get my photos via photostream and Aperture. I Find however that this gets messy when you’re using more than one Aperture library. The advantage of the new Lightroom app is that you can import from your camera roll automatically, and the resulting images will be synced right into your Lightroom catalogue. It also means that any changes you make to your iPhone pictures in Lightroom on your iPhone get synced across as non destructive edits, which is pretty cool.

I did come across a few issues with the process, and the initial sync was quite slow, but I’ll put that down to the fact that I was trying to do it under patchy wifi on the train on the way back to Dublin from Galway. I’ll have a proper review of Lightroom mobile once I’ve spent a bit more time with it.In the mean time there’s a few more pictures from the shoot below, and you can see the full set without all this waffle over on my Photo’s only blog.

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