‘It was a real carnival of the senses’: Shamil Tanna’s best phone picture
‘There’s a slight voyeuristic quality to using a phone to take pictures,” Shamil Tanna says. The London-based photographer was in Menorca last summer for Fiestas de Sant Lluìs, a series of events “revolving around the island’s purebred horses and traditional Menorcan dressage”.
“I was staying on the island for a while and was keen to shoot some personal projects,” he says. “I’d just replaced my old phone and the festivities provided a good opportunity to try the new model out. It was super-busy, full of people, horses, parades and music – a real carnival of the senses.”
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Tanna notes that using a phone rather than a bigger SLR allows you to photograph people in a very informal and inconspicuous way. It makes it much easier to shoot under the radar: “The quality of iPhone images nowadays is crazy good – with a bit of TLC you can produce absolutely fine prints for an A4 frame.”
For this image and the wider set he captured that summer, he used the app VSCO for editing. “I have a preset that grades the images with lots of colour saturation and contrast to really make them pop, then added a load of film grain,” he says. “I’m a big fan of doing this; some digital photographs are a bit too clinical and sharp for me. Adding grain helps them feel more organic.”
