Once again I am pleased to present this years ’24 Mobile Photographers Til Christmas’. It is a series that has been run throughout December for the last couple of years and has always been successfully received. In part, it is to celebrate the forthcoming festive season but also to celebrate another year in the timeline of Mobiography.

In the series I ask 24 hand picked mobile photographers to offer an insight into their work, to reflect on their year gone by or plans for the coming year ahead. Each featured photographer is someone who has inspired or supported me in one way or another during the course of the past year. One photographer will be showcased each day until Christmas Eve in a sort of online advent calendar so to speak.

Today’s featured photographer is Graeme Roy

My biggest takeaway about mobile photography this year is…

Photo by Graeme Roy

I think the main thing I have tried to understand of late is that there is a vast audience out there, and just because someone is very popular or conversely has few followers is no real indicator of either the quality of their work or, more importantly, how their work will resonate with me.

There are lots of photographers with huge audiences, but their photos just don’t interest me that much. There are also lots of photographers with modest followings that produce really interesting and challenging work, in my opinion anyway. So there’s not a universally qualitative ‘good’ or ‘bad’, only how I view someone’s work for myself and what I get out of it, how it effects me and what emotion it elicits. Because at the end of the day, I’m a consumer just like everyone else and I have the ability to chose what I want to see and what I don’t want to see.

This understanding of the relative terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and how they are meaningless outside of my personal frame of reference has really come into focus for me because I’ve realized that there are so many viewers and consumers of photography out there – over 400-million on Instagram alone. That is a staggeringly large audience size when you think of it. Just because I like something doesn’t mean anybody has to share that view, and by the same token images that I don’t enjoy can have a very large and receptive audience.

I took part in a photo project with at-risk youth in Toronto this year with @jayucanada where we went out shooting and tried to help them gain some photo skills to try and express themselves through mobile photography. It was a fantastically enriching experience seeing what they shot and what was important to them, and how images helped them tell their stories. We were able to put on some shows, sell prints and make some money for them on top of it. I learned a lot from seeing what they shot and how they felt about individual photos, and why they liked some rather than others based on their experiences which helped me see the world through their eyes if only for a moment.

I think what I’ve learned from this about my own style of photography is that it is not to going to be everyone’s taste and that’s okay. I’ve tried to relax a bit this year and frankly not think about it too much. I seem to shoot photos the way I shoot them, for better or worse it is what it is. I’ve tried to push myself to find photos that are different for me, to arguably varying levels of success – and not ‘follower’ success, but success in how I felt about my own photo. Sometimes I really like something, and think I’ve done a great job – a little pat on the back moment for myself – only to have the photo fall quite flatly on my feed! Oh well, I liked it because it was unexpected for me.

While the vast majority of my feed is mobile-generated, I have on occasion used a ‘real’ camera while out-and-about. And the funny thing is that I shoot the exact same photos either way. To the point that sometimes I have to try and remember what I shot what with when I look in my iPhone photo library. It’s not really so much the tool, it’s the eyes that see it, the camera is just a means to record it.

Connect with Graeme Roy

Instagram