Thanks to a recent interview with Greg Schmigel from JustwhatIsee.com I've decided to finally give a long overdue update to my flickr profile. I'm sure that Greg won't mind my using his questions and my responses to them as the basis for my bio.

Tell me a little bit about yourself (name, age, hometown, etc…basic info.)

My name is Ron Lemise and I am 40 years old. I was born and bred in New Jersey and raised by my loving parents in the suburban town of Rochelle Park. I’m currently living in Jersey City, NJ with my beautiful wife Biyana, darling 3 year old daughter Eliana and a neurotic Boston Terrier named Zelda.

What (or who) got you interested in photography in general?

I owe my love of photography to two people. The first is my Father who was a photography enthusiast and worked for Kodak. I was about 5 years old when I took my first photo - a portrait of my Mom and Dad - using his Nikon F. At his knee I learned the basics of composition, metering and focusing.

 

The second person to encourage my interest in photography was my high school photography teacher, Mr. Rau. During his class, I fell head over heels in love with darkroom chemistry and I was introduced to the brilliance of photographic luminaries like Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Ansel Adams all of whom continue to inspire me today.

 

After high school I went on to begin a career in photography as a lab technician working in 2 of Northern New Jersey’s top commercial photo labs. In my early twenties I took a third job as a sports photographer shooting Standardbred and Thoroughbred Horse Racing and promotional materials for the Meadowlands Race Track which eventually turned into full time work for me. I loved shooting in the outdoors and relished the hectic pace involved with shooting, developing and printing the photos for transmission and publication within hours of a race. I still miss the smell of the stop bath and fixer but never did get used to the smell of the horses in the paddock.

 

Ultimately as digital photography matured from its infancy, it became increasingly evident that my hard earned darkroom skills would one day become commercially obsolete. I set my sights on school to learn computer programming and after Graduation in late 2000 I gave up professional photography for a career as programmer. I found it rather liberating in that it offered me much more time to focus - no pun intended - on more artistic photographic pursuits.

Why have you taken up the iPhone as a tool for photography?

For me it was a natural evolution. I had been shooting with various digital cameras since the late nineties and it immediately became evident to me that the iPhone would be the ideal tool for artistic expression in much the same way that Polaroid, Diana, Holga and Lomo toy cameras were for me during my analog years. The lack of controls allow me to concentrate on the subject and composition and I find that liberation appealing. I was rarely pleased with the quality of the photos so I began digitally retouching in Adobe Lightroom. And then along came the app store and everything changed. Now I could shoot, process and post all from the palm of my hand wherever I happened to be. It was as if I’d died and gone to photographer’s heaven. My other cameras have been gathering dust ever since.

What apps/processes do you use -- if any -- when shooting with the iPhone?

I use way too many apps to list here. If I hear about a new photo app I feel almost compelled to check it out for myself. But here are a few of my “goto” apps and why I really like them.

 

ShakeItPhoto does one thing brilliantly. It turns your photos into “polaroids”. I find it to be the best of the Polaroid apps in the app store although I’m hoping the developer updates the app to support the higher resolution of the iPhone 4. Nick, you listening?

 

Tiffen’s Cool fx and Photo fx are must have apps for any iPhoneographer. There are virtually limitless combinations of filters and effects you can achieve using these apps. Your imagination is your only limitation. I’ve long used Tiffen’s actual photo filters so purchasing “filter” apps from a company like Tiffen seemed to be a no-brainer to me.

 

Hipstamatic appealed to the analog geek in me so naturally I had to buy it and I haven’t been disappointed. I do wish that the developers would build in the ability to choose a photo from the Camera Roll and/or allow simultaneous saving of the original image but I respect for their reasons for not doing so. The whole point of the app is to replicate the feel of shooting analog with a Holga, Lomo or a Diana and they’ve done a brilliant job reproducing that.

 

TiltShiftGen is my goto app for selectively blurring a photo. It’s got some nice built in exposure tweaking ability and does beautiful vignetting.

 

Pic Grunger is a neat tool that helps age or weather your photos. I used to be obsessed with polaroid transfers and although this app doesn’t replicate that effect, it appeals to the “messy borders” nerd in me.

 

New additions in heavy rotation are Camera+, PerfectlyClr and Diptic.

The Gear I use:

iPhone

Nikon D300 Body

Nikon D70 Body

Nikon SB800 Flash

Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D - I LOVE primes

Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom - This is a beautifully constructed zoom lens and leaps and bounds beyond the kit lenses quality wise