I recently took some time off to have a well deserved holiday in the beautiful seaside city of Nice in the south of France. Normally when I travel I take an assortment of cameras, with the main one usually being my D700 with 28-300 lens. However, as the primary purpose of this trip was to relax and unwind, I wanted to travel light and, to be honest, I had considered not taking any cameras and just enjoying the sunshine. Of course, the photographer inside me wouldn't let that happen! I decided to bring my X-E1 and an old Film camera, but I ended up taking most of my pictures with my iPhone.

As I said, I wasn't really there for a photography trip, so using the phone came naturally as I had it with me the whole time, and was just more fun and relaxing to shoot with. I also had some problems using the X-E1 in bright light, but more on that in another post. In the spirit of travelling light I didn't bring a laptop either, and just had my iPad, so it was a good way to test out working entirely on mobile devices. I processed my image primarily with VSCO cam and Lightroom mobile. This worked reasonably well although it was not without some caveats. Both apps sync between the iPhone and iPad versions, so for example, I could import some images into VSCO cam on my iPhone and they would appear on the iPad version too (eventually, given the not exactly speedy hotel wifi)

Any images I processed in VSCO cam I would export back to the camera roll and then import into Lightroom mobile. This had the advantage of allowing me to then further work on them either on my iPhone or the iPad, but it also meant that when I got home back to my computer, they were already there in Lightroom waiting for me. They were also in Photos. Oh, how far we've come with the cloud!

It wasn't entirely seamless though. VSCO cam was crashing regularly when I tried to export multiple images at once. Syncing was also pretty slow (hotel wifi to blame there). Despite all that, we're definitely heading in the right direction. I can see that in another generation it will certainly be a perfectly acceptable workflow, even on professional shoots. At the moment though, its a bit finicky.

As for the shots themselves, I'm pretty happy with the results (I really wasn't trying very hard). The one funny thing about them is that they look much better on a retina display for some reason. When viewing them on my MacBook Pro or even my iPad the images look like they were taken with a far more serious camera, but on my (non retina) desktop they still have that phone look off them. I'm not sure why this is, as you would expect the retina display would be less forgiving. My next task is to print some out and see how they look.

Video

I also shot a good bit of video on my iPhone while I was there too. This was another interesting experience. The video workflow is much easier. I shot everything on the iPhone, then edited using iMovie on the same device and was able to upload the results to Vimeo without any hassle at all. While iMovie on the iPhone doesn't have a hue array of features, it was perfect for what I wanted, but the fact that you can edit HD video seamlessly with virtually no rendering and no lag, stuttering or delay of any kind, on a phone is still kind of mind blowing to me.