In July of 2021, I visited Maine for the first time. Though I knew I would be backpacking during my visit, I opted not to bring my primary camera.
There were a couple reasons for this. First and foremost, as the backpacking trip was part of a bachelor party, I didn’t think it would be wise to hold up a group of young men racing to the top of the mountains while I took photos of the ground. The second critical consideration was that I was deep in a creative rut at the time, and I didn’t want the added pressure on myself to create something. So I was happy to leave my camera behind and shave a few pounds from my pack.
By the time we’d parked at the trailhead, however, I was already planning on trying out a new approach to photography: snapshot-style images captured in RAW with my cell phone, a Pixel 5. The camera on this device is average at best, but I wasn’t concerned about megapixels or image quality at the time. I simply wanted a mechanism of creating images that was fast, lightweight, and didn’t get in my way.
I was relatively pleased with the results. The RAW files themselves were quite small compared to my Fuji, but I found that they left me with plenty to work with when I got back to my computer. More importantly, I found that using my phone to capture images put me in a different mindset, more at ease with the creative process and detached from any particular creative outcome.
This little experiment resulted in many images, of which I have selected six to share in this gallery.
