Cameraphone Gallery Show

May 24, 2007 8:31 AM

"Even LG Electronics Inc., maker of the handset Elmi uses, initially didn't believe her photos originated from its LG8100 phone when she asked the company to sponsor a recent gallery exhibit of her camera-phone art." (news, gallery works)
posted by mathowie (34 comments total)

We broke her interweb.
posted by GuyZero at 8:38 AM on May 24, 2007

Matt's "gallery works" link didn't work for me at first either. Then i went through this URL first and now it works.
posted by vacapinta at 8:41 AM on May 24, 2007

No worky even when I vacapinta it. Weird.
posted by dobbs at 8:45 AM on May 24, 2007

Site is still broken for me, with that link, vacapinta.
posted by yeoz at 8:45 AM on May 24, 2007

one was working for a minute, now neither do. looked good for the minute i saw it, couldn't enlarge the photos though, so a little small.
posted by andywolf at 8:46 AM on May 24, 2007

I got in after tinkering with vacapinta's link. The "abstracts" appear to be unlinked thumbnails, though — which, on a 12" monitor, means I'm basically looking at a gallery of chat icons. Maybe if you see them up close, it's impressive that they were taken with a cell phone; but what I'm seeing looks like it was taken with a cell phone.
posted by cribcage at 8:47 AM on May 24, 2007

That big white image really spoke to me. "Service Unavailable" - such an acerbic critique of the neoplatonic regimen. This era of new media is truly allowing profound new ways to speak truth to power.
posted by freebird at 8:48 AM on May 24, 2007 [5 favorites has favorites]

I got in, but I didn't see any of her actually photos, unless these are some in which case I'm not really impressed.

It looks like she may have gone in and try to re-compress all her images to save on bandwidth. In the link above the pictures are compressed down to 32k and look awful.
posted by delmoi at 8:53 AM on May 24, 2007

Weird, her site works fine for me still, even on different computers.
posted by mathowie at 8:54 AM on May 24, 2007

I saved the shot of her thumbnails, here they are.
posted by mathowie at 8:55 AM on May 24, 2007

It's a bummer that they have to be so small, but - from what I can see - the colors and textures are pretty good. I think I'd credit the photographer more than the phone, though. She snapped some interesting scenery in interesting ways. I have a feeling that, while the picture quality might still be great for a cell phone, we'd be able to tell they were cell pics at full size. But that doesn't mean the photos aren't cool. Megapixels just aren't everything.
posted by katillathehun at 9:01 AM on May 24, 2007

Elmi is the new lomo.
posted by NewBornHippy at 9:04 AM on May 24, 2007

Yeah, I can reliably get in every time on both URLs and it loads fast even when I force reload (no cache)
posted by vacapinta at 9:04 AM on May 24, 2007

Yeah I get a service unavailable message too which is a shame as judging by those thumbnails they look pretty interesting.
posted by ob at 9:07 AM on May 24, 2007

Maybe its a referrer block? I actually got there by clicking on the "news" link then clicking on the URL at the bottom of that. Can someone who is blocked try that?
posted by vacapinta at 9:10 AM on May 24, 2007

They seem cool, but almost any image seems cool when it's a centimeter square. The real-life pieces are 6x6"- it would be very nice to see them life-size.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:13 AM on May 24, 2007

yeah, I just copy & pasted the url into a different browser and it worked fine.
posted by rschroed at 9:19 AM on May 24, 2007

Is this posting meant to be an advert for a phone?
posted by humblepigeon at 9:24 AM on May 24, 2007

freebird: "That big white image really spoke to me. "Service Unavailable" - such an acerbic critique of the neoplatonic regimen. This era of new media is truly allowing profound new ways to speak truth to power."

Plus, I hear it's really hard to get an unobstructed shot of that in the wild...
posted by PontifexPrimus at 9:40 AM on May 24, 2007

Is this posting meant to be an advert for a phone?

I thought it was the opposite. Read the quote I pasted -- the people that make it didn't believe her because they knew their phone took crappy pictures. I thought it was funny, and the images were fairly interesting and abstract, so I posted it.
posted by mathowie at 9:48 AM on May 24, 2007

Are you supposed to be able to enlarge the thumbnails?
posted by puke & cry at 9:55 AM on May 24, 2007

You can also see them here on the LG website
posted by patricio at 10:14 AM on May 24, 2007

From the LG site link:

Untouched by computer or digital enhancing, her images are alive with color, flowing with shapes and stalked by shadows.

That's impressive, I was convinced she had messed around in Photoshop after taking them. Nice abstracts.
posted by twistedonion at 10:56 AM on May 24, 2007

It just goes to show that it's not the tools, it's the artist who wields them.

Which is why even with a thousand dollar SLR, my pictures still look like crap.
posted by quin at 11:00 AM on May 24, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Untouched by computer or digital enhancing, her images are alive with color, flowing with shapes and stalked by shadows.

False.

Every single cameraphone does sharpening, contrast enhancement, and other tricks internally.

That statement is absurd.
posted by fake at 12:50 PM on May 24, 2007

Every single cameraphone does sharpening, contrast enhancement, and other tricks internally.

i think everyone here knows that. In fact, every device does processing, including your own eye [insert rambling philosophical debate about what 'unenhanced' really means]

The meaning is that it has not been touched after leaving the cameraphone, thus the reference to the incredulousness expressed by the cameraphone manufacturers themselves.
posted by vacapinta at 1:02 PM on May 24, 2007

Vacapinta, I disagree that everyone here knows how much processing happens internally even in (and especially in) the most simple seeming digicams.

My point, however inelegant, was that it is ridiculous to hold these things up as unaltered, or even exceptional. Properties like sharpness, color vibrance, and flowing shapes coming out of such a device are not surprising. In fact, they are by design. The design of the engineers that made it. They do not reflect the reality of what the sensor is looking at, they represent design assumptions made to perceptually please, executed by FPGAs.

I'm not even going to talk about all the kinds of manipulation that had to happen to get the prints.

I am working towards a PhD in early human vision (V1 and before). The processing that I'm talking about, like local contrast enhancement, directly influence early visual mechanisms, like the ones you are talking about.
posted by fake at 1:32 PM on May 24, 2007

Properties like sharpness, color vibrance, and flowing shapes coming out of such a device are not surprising. In fact, they are by design.

Have you taken photos with a cellphone before? Because the properties of these images were still a complete and utter surprise to me, even knowing how this all works.
posted by mathowie at 2:05 PM on May 24, 2007

Sharpness I can "understand" and color vibrance is , I guess, referring to "saturation" and the practice of saturating colors so they look more "colourful" ...but flowing shapes ? EH ?!
posted by elpapacito at 2:17 PM on May 24, 2007

via patricio's link to LG:
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua002.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vau005.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua007.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua010.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua017.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua022.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua037.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua040.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua045.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua046.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua055.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua063.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua080.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua089.jpg
http://www.lifewithlg.com/images/events/view-from-a-cell/photos/vua096.jpg
posted by acro at 3:00 PM on May 24, 2007

That's impressive, I was convinced she had messed around in Photoshop after taking them. Nice abstracts.

It's a phone. Do you have any idea the increadible amount of random crap they do to the images you take with them? Noise reduction is just the start of it. Saturation, contrast and sharpness is usally increased artificially as well. Simply because the photographer didn't do it doesn't make it any less manipulated.

Also, this is abstract photography, who freakin cares what device it was made with? They could just as well be sketches to be honest.
posted by public at 3:54 PM on May 24, 2007

I'll take that 1000 dollar slr if you don't want it : )

I'm very keen on cameraphones, if they get any more advanced they would be fantastic for reportage work because they are so unobtrusive - what's the top end of the camera phone market like these days ? (i was hearing 7 megapixels).

Oh they used to love me in class trying to show me the mighty 5x4 and i'm snappin it with a cameraphone, that went down real well.

Anyway, this stuff reminds me of Bright Tal on flickr who's just great and does nothing but abstracts.
posted by sgt.serenity at 5:30 PM on May 24, 2007

No matter what processing was done, they all still look like clipart.
posted by klangklangston at 6:12 AM on May 25, 2007

It's a phone. Do you have any idea the increadible amount of random crap they do to the images you take with them?

What I had meant was impressive was not the phone but the photographer. I consider myself to have a pretty good eye but I still cheat by cropping an image or adjusting the saturation,levels etc.

From these photos it's obvious that she understands her tool well and uses it's limitations to her advantage. just my 2 cents, these things are so subjective.
posted by twistedonion at 7:48 AM on May 25, 2007