In the Cambridge University Botanic Garden with a new black and white photography app called "Blackie"

I needed to clear my head a little this afternoon after a morning working through the implications of something written by Raymond Geuss, a philosopher whose thinking I find both highly challenging and amenable and so I took myself off for lunch in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden. The sun was out and during my walk there were plenty of places where I could sit out of the wind and in the restorative warmth of the sun. (If you are interested you can see a couple of very short Youtube films in which Geuss is interviewed HERE and HERE.)

As always I took a few photos as I went and, on this occasion, I used throughout a new black and white iPhone photography app called “Blackie” (@blackieapp). I think it is a delightful and excellent app made by someone who clearly loves black and white photography and whoever it is I congratulate them. The range of options available to the photographer is great but not utterly overwhelming and this allows one to take a wide variety of shots as you will see throughout this post.

I can barely imagine the amount of hard work that goes into developing these things and so I’m one of those people who is grateful simply to work with the given possibilities and limitations of these things. For me it’s part of their charm. However, after using the app solidly for a good couple of hours, I found myself wishing that it were possible to do two other things with the app. The first is to be able simply to reset each of the eight available film types to a reasonable default set of settings after having played about with them for a particular shot. The second is the ability to save some favourite settings for later use. Perhaps these options will come along later, perhaps not, but whether or not they do I’m certainly going to enjoy this little app a great deal and I certainly recommend it to any black and white iPhoneographers out there. As always just click on a photo to enlarge it.