Captured #22: May 2026

It’s been a little quiet on my newsletter front. I go through phases trying to decide what this newsletter is actually for, wondering whether it would be better as a blog post on my website or even put in the dumpster, but I’ll stick with it for the time being on its new, irregular schedule.

Do you think the newsletter idea still has legs, or could it do with a glow up? Hit reply and let me know your thoughts! 🫡

📷 Dublin Street Photography Festival

One of my photos was selected as a finalist at the Dublin Street Photography Festival. I’d never been to such an event before, so I decided to hop over and check it out.

The festival is not-for-profit and entirely free to attend, even the talks. It’s funded by the fee that photographers pay to submit an image to the competitions, plus some corporate sponsorship. It’s a true labour of love for the two guys who run it. Bravo Paul and Des!

Most street photography festivals seem to consist of exhibitions, talks, and workshops. Dublin had an exhibition of all the finalists from their competitions (Single Image, Series and Portraits), as well as displays from some renowned photographers – Phil Penman, Meryl Meisler, and Louis Stettner being the main ones, but there were a dozen others exhibited outside the venue.

I watched a bunch talks and particularly enjoyed those by Phil Penman, Meryl Meisler, Stuart Paton, Chris Harrison, and Sam Ferris.

I also attended a couple of workshops, one with Stuart Paton and another with Sara Melhuish. Stuart’s was all day and fairly intensive – he provided critical feedback during a portfolio review, and pushed everyone to find a unique point of view to improve their work. I’m still ruminating on that one.

I met lots of lovely people from all over the world and I loved it. It’s not often you get to hang out with a load of creatives and street photo nerds like this, including many well-known photographers who were more than happy to chat over a pint down the pub. I’ll definitely consider going back next year, and some other festivals are already on my radar.

I wonder if I’m allowed to say I’m an internationally exhibited photographer now? Pushing it a bit, I think… 😅

📱 Should you ditch the expensive cameras and use an expensive phone instead?

I had a short break in Barcelona recently (holiday, not a photo trip) and decided to use my iPhone 17 Pro for all the photography I did. This was partly because I couldn’t be bothered carrying a camera around with me, but also because I’d been trying out a couple of apps and I thought the results were fun.

The first app was Leica LUX which is made by Leica, of course. Leica claim this app brings “their legendary imagery directly to your iPhone”, which is a bit of a bold claim. Like their cameras, the app is ludicrously priced – not only is it a subscription model as opposed to a one-off cost (grrr), it’s a whopping £6.99 a month or £69.99 a year for an app that essentially just applies a few filters to standard iPhone pics. Like I say, it’s ludicrous. Still, I forked out £6.99 to give it a run.

I actually liked the simplicity of the app. You can’t zoom, you can only select one of the default sizes (0.5x, 1.0x, 2x etc). It’s one click to choose a filter, or one click to choose a specific Leica lens. The filters are actually pretty great (I liked Leica Chrome and Leica Teal), but the lens option is a bit of a gimmick. Sure you can pick a Summilux 35mm F1.4 and the result looks fun, but all it’s doing is setting the zoom to 35mm and applying the iPhone’s portrait mode, both which you can do yourself in the normal camera app anyway.

I was shooting in RAW with Leica LUX, and if you want the full 48 megapixels you need to shoot at 0.5x (urgh), 1.0x or 4.0x only. Anything else will shoot at 12 megapixels because it’s just a crop. So I decided to only shoot at 1x (24mm full frame equivalent – quite wide, but a focal length I like) or 4x (100mm). Nightmare, but I actually found this a fun challenge!

While I liked the UX of the Leica app, I didn’t like it enough to pay the subscription. I’d probably buy a month every now and again when I go on holiday, but that’s about it.

The other app I used was mood.camera. This is a bit more like the Instagram of yore, but without the social sharing. The app comes with a bunch of hand-crafted film stocks, each of which has a unique, retro look – nice colours, lots of grain. You can’t shoot RAW with this app (doesn’t make a lot of sense given that it’s filter based), you can only set it to save 12- or 24-megapixel images. Again, if you use anything other than 0.5x, 1.0x or 4.0x you’ll only get 12 megapixel. There isn’t an option for 48 megapixel though, which is odd – I don’t see why not.

mood.camera is even more fun than Leica LUX and the results are bolder and more original. I really like the vibe, but it’s probably not for everyone. Some of the film stocks are too much for me (although you can tailor the level of each one, which is a nice touch) but I particularly liked Gold and Taiga which I used most of the time.

mood.camera is made by one person, has a brilliant philosophy (read the website) and you can buy it outright for £14.99 which is a very good deal in the subscription age. Kudos to the developer.

Despite thinking I wouldn’t, I actually loved the experience of shooting with these apps on a phone and it’s liberating not to have any editing to do. I definitely prefer a physical camera to hold, but it was so convenient to whip out the phone and snap photos that way, and I think the results were pretty good. While some of them are 48 megapixels, the clarity and sharpness is pretty terrible compared to a 40 megapixel photo from my camera, of course. That said, they’re definitely good enough!

One thing I noticed is that the majority of my images were taken in portrait orientation, mainly because phones make this easier to do. This is the opposite of a proper camera, and I love landscape orientation these days, but still I ended up taking most in portrait. I could probably train myself out of this, given time.

I won’t be ditching my proper cameras, of course, but I’ll definitely enjoy taking photos more in the future with apps like these.

Here are some example shots - no edits. Any guesses which app took which?

📷 Medium Format Digital Photography

I loaned the epic Fujifilm GFX100S II recently for a couple of weeks. This is a complete beast of a camera which is completely unsuitable for street photography, but I had a great time giving it a run for its money regardless.

I wrote a blog post all about the experience.

🔗 Links station

Finds from web wandering:

• Aphera is a RAW editor that’s coming soon for Mac. Not sure it’ll be a Lightroom replacement any time soon, but it’s good to see some innovation in the space.
• Da Vinci Resolve now supports editing and organising of photographs, not just video. This is a Lightroom competitor in many ways, but it’s just too complicated and entwined with video for my liking. If they made a separate app I’d be more interested.
• How did I not know about Adobe Color? It’s a website that allows you to play around with colour palettes which can be pretty useful from an editing perspective.
• Streetwise is an app to “Discover photographers and places, together”. I haven’t used it, but it might be useful if you’re visiting a new place.
• There’s candid street photography as it has always been done – capturing moments unseen but not trying to hide what you’re doing. Then there’s creepy, sneaky, surreptitious photography which is made even easier now people can do it with their glasses. I can’t see anything good about these devices and you’ll probably feel the same after reading The Rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Creep.
• Don’t plan your photography, just explore.
• Over the course of 140 shooting days, Austin Bell photographed all 2,549 outdoor basketball courts in Hong Kong. This is simply incredible work! 🤩

📺 Tubes

I am very late to the party but I just discovered grainydays on YouTube and I’m obsessed. Here’s a selection from his channel that I loved watching recently. There are dozens I’ve yet to watch so I’m going to savour them over the coming months. They’re so good!

The downside is I now feel a strong urge to go on a road trip across the USA with several cameras and bags of film. Who’s up for it? 😅💸💸💸

It’s just noise 🔈

The sound of the streets.

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¡Hasta luego, amigos! 👋