Survey of independent mobile photo blogs
The grandaddy of mobile photography blogs and the source of the name for the new genre, iphoneography.com, closed towards the end of last year. No wonder - competition is fierce. Launched in November 2008 and running for five years, iphoneography.com was ahead of its time, with its unbiased reviews of the many apps and mobile photography gadgets that were emerging at that time and news about a photographic genre just starting out in 2008. But now as Instagram users pass 150 million and Flickr tells us the most used camera on its platform is a mobile device, demand for written content about mobile photography is strong. Today’s range of websites and blogs dedicated to mobile photography offers us a variety of app reviews, news, photographer interviews, competitions, tutorials and opinion.
Launched just after iphoneography.com and still going (just) are LifeInLoFi, which produces reviews and some quite insightful editorial, and P1xels. Dedicated to fine art mobile photography, this site showcases artists and has organised many real-life exhibitions and initiatives. Also in the fine-art space are iPhoneArt, again showcasing and interviewing artists and now moving into the gallery business and The Art of Mob, which showcases mobile artists and provides how-to tutorials. Another blog with arty aspirations is AMPt Community, though you will have to apply to membership to access all its features. Grryo (recently re-branded from the equally uncatchy Juxt) has a similar community-oriented approach, with a strong heritage in street photography and an archive of interesting and socially-aware photo stories from its contributors.
All the main photo-sharing platforms such as Flickr, Instagram, EyeEm and VSCO run their own blogs and many of them produce good content. An unofficial Instagram blog, Instagramers, which has probably done more to promote Instagram than Instagram itself, gives news about the general mobile community and features on the activities, both on- and off-line, of the more than 330 local groups around the world it has given its name to.
Anyone who has tried to deliver content for their own blog will know that the pressure to produce good material regularly can be hard. For this reason, some of these blogs will go off the grid for weeks, sometimes months, at a time, and some will post regularly but not very often. But one blog that seems relentless in its flow of news, views and features is The App Whisperer. This blog offers some of mobile photography’s best known names as columnists, alongside reviews, competitions, app giveaways and tutorials. Specialising in tutorials is another of the longest-running blogs, iPhoneography Central, while a relative newcomer, The iPhone Photography School, produces some excellent hints and tips pieces. Another website that gives budding mobile photographers help and support through its chat rooms and network of supporters is Mobitog. Some of the interesting newcomers with their fingers on the pulse and often quicker to react than the big boys, are bloggers like skipology and moblivious.
While all the above blogs are sustaining their efforts through advertising and/or the promise of a big pay-day when traffic is strong enough to sell out, two blogs are subscription-only (sold in the form of apps): FLTR and Mobiography. FLTR has the considerable backing of the British Journal of Photography and so is able to run some impressive interviews and is produced with a high level of journalistic rigour. Mobiography has produced an impressively consistent flow of content from many of the genre’s insiders and after a year of issues now seems to have survived the initial precarious start-up period.
With so many blogs competing in the same space, some blogs, like Mogitog, have found a clever way of delivering content without very much effort, using aggregating “newspapers” that simply pull news and features from original sources, via websites like paper.li. Titles, such as The iPhoneography Times and iPhoneography Today, are usually completely automated. They point at the real blogs and their robots extract news stories using a variety of logarithms and tags. There is usually no editorial intervention at all so they sometimes (thanks to their targets’ tag-savvy authors) include stories that are of no relevance to mobile photography. But often they gather together quite good “best-of” selections of daily mobile photography blogging output.
While many of the blogs’ content may vary in quality, be very sporadic or sometimes amount to little more than sponsored content, there are some good pieces to be found in the iphoneography blogosphere. Many are trying to monetise their traffic, so we will be watching to see if their commercial deals compromise the quality of their content. And while the blog that gave its name to the sub-genre may be no more, there are many iphoneography (or mobile photography) blogs out there doing a good job filling the space that it left.
A version of this article originally appeared in FLTR magazine
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