Over the past several years, I have become involved with several different events within the Phoenix area. I work with the Ignite Phoenix crew when I am in town to shoot their big events. And I help with planning and usually shooting for ImprovAZ. Both groups are a lot of fun and have their own challenges.

Yesterday, ImprovAZ had their Applemob. All participants were instructed to purchase a specific shirt (blue shirt, white heart with a bite out of it, with an apple stem) and meet at the Starbucks at Kierland Commons in Scottsdale for details. Once the 28 or so people arrived, they were instructed how to proceed and most importantly how to not disrupt. This was to be a more covert photography assignment, so the Cannon was out for this one. The entire Applemob took roughly 30 minutes.

I shot without my Canon. I did shoot with two different cameras: my iPhone 4 and my Flip HD video camera. First off I felt really naked! I know it sounds weird for me to be shooting with two cameras and feel naked but there is really something to the weight and feel of the Canon I use.

The Flip was simple enough as I turned it on and put it in my jean’s pocket and let it roll (I guess roll isn’t really a term used any more since it is all digital). The iPhone 4 though was a different story. First off it is not easy to shoot from the hip and capture images of anything other than people’s behinds (at least at my height)! Not sure I was so covert but I was using an Apple product so it probably didn’t look as bad as it could anywhere else! The iPhone 4 doesn’t respond as fast as my Canon but I was still able to take roughly 200 shots during the event. I wasn’t sure of the quality of the images as I was shooting. The is more grain and noise in the images than I usually would allow but not as bad as I envisioned. The final result was 98 images posted to the Flickr group.