Today, the iPhone is a mysterious man that offers to sharpen your sense of sight and dull everything else, your taste, your hearing, your ability to touch and to smell. Right away, wouldn’t your world start to seem one dimensional?

What is food without scent and taste to colour it?

But hang on a minute, with sharpened sight, you start to notice details that you may have decided not to notice when you were dealing with all your senses at once.


You see light and shadow, pattern and movement. Little things that once escaped notice because they were insignificant, or in odd corners. Or because they helped form the part of the whole impression of a place, rather than demand your central attention. These little details enrich without calling attention to themselves.

But no, life is incomplete without all the senses at play. And even as you revel in your newly achieved clarity, your dulled senses start to return as the hypnotic iPhone runs out of battery. Slowly, you smell the Peking Duck and hear the buzz of chatter in the background. Sweet relief.

iPhoneography Monday
App: Gorillacam, Snapseed

Black and white photos can be so emotive even with its limited palette. It shows up the interplay of light and the dark in spaces, makes more pronounced the profile of people and things, removes the clutter that is colour and creates a moment of stillness that makes me anticipate the future that follows.

Pictures taken at myVillage, a little mall that we were visiting for porridge and some light dim sum.