Mobile, In Reverse

My daughter, like many young creatives, invents her own workflows for digital photography – shoot on DSLR, edit on mobile.

Reverse Mobile DSLR shot crop

I teach mobile production – that is, creating content on mobile, for mobile. But I’m also a traditional photographer and filmmaker – that is, making things with film!

This week I was struck by how creative people solve problems in very personal ways. I noticed this with my own daughter, who is growing to be quite a talented photographer.

But she does stuff backwards! (At least, from my own training.)

I’ve been teaching her how to use a DSLR to expand her photography beyond her mobile device. She has learned how to take really interesting photos with her iPhone 7, but has been a little intimidated by my old Canon DLSR with a big lens.

That is, until she really got hold of it. Now she’s a maniac! She is shooting a lot.

So what’s the next thing I want to teach her? Well, I’m thinking about putting a copy of Photoshop and Lightroom on another computer at home so she can learn those programs and learn to edit her images, “the right way.” But she doesn’t wait for me to figure out my licensing on AdobeCC and all that…

She invents her own workflow: DSLR to mobile.

This is how it goes:

  • shoot using the DSLR, capturing on an SD card
  • The SD card goes into the Mac Mini
  • The photos import into Photos App

So far, so good. But, instead of needing Photoshop (or Affinity Photo, or…,) she just:

  • emails them to herself at the original size, saves them to her Camera Roll on the iPhone, and
  • edits them in the free Snapseed app.

She is already comfortable with that app, so why mess with something hulking like Photoshop?! And, Snapseed has many more fun features for processing photos than boring old Photoshop.

Butterfly in Motion
A butterfly comes in for a landing on summer flowers – photo by AK

She makes really interesting, really good photos.

The things we old(er) folks can learn from our intuitive younger counterparts!

Do you have a backwards story like this?

Author: TomK

I'm a husband, father, and adopted child of God. Vocationally, I'm a visual storyteller; that means filmmaker with all its possible variations as the world of visual storytelling grows and changes. I like to tell and pass on stories that help people find the place where their deep satisfaction meets the others' deep needs.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: