At some point in my life I used to not be broke constantly and I used to back a ton of projects on Kickstarter. I backed mostly photo projects but occasionally I would check out the other art on the site and I found this woman named Lucy Sparrow who was trying to raise money to build an entire bodega (or whatever they call bodegas in the UK) out of felt stuffed animals that she sewed herself. It seemed completely insane and so I donated some money and got a stuffed can of tomato soup out of the deal. Since then, I have followed Lucy’s career and she has done a number of pop up art galleries including another one in NYC that I unfortunately misse

Yesterday her newest pop up gallery opened, Delicatessen on 6th, and entire store filled with every type of anthropomorphic food you could imagine. I had to go this time and I went down to Rockefeller Center to check it out. I actually pitched the show super last minute to Gothamist, but they were already covering it so I went down there without a camera, HOWEVER, once I got there I had an idea.

I just got the iPhone 11 Pro and its camera is a huge jump up from the camera on the iPhone 8 that I have had for the last couple of years. I tested it out a couple of days ago on my friend Michelle, but other than that I hadn’t really used the camera. I suddenly decided that this would be a fun excuse to play with it. I shot over 100 photos using just my phone and ended up with about 50 decent shots. I didn’t do any editing to them, so these are just what they looked like out of camera…. er, phone. The one thing I did was crop them all so they looked like all the other photos on my site which was by far the hardest part. I had to cut a lot of stuff out and some of the shots just didn’t work cropped, but when I was shooting I did plan for the crop so if I left them uncropped they wouldn’t have looked very good either. It was pretty annoying. 

Overall I was pretty happy with the quality, especially because the show was kinda poorly lit and the phone gave no fucks. I could have probably made them look better with some color balancing, but that doesn’t really sound like something I would do. People looked the worst on it, and you could really tell how high the ISO is in some of the shots with a lot of grain in the background, but what are you gonna do, it’s a damn phone. Still, I am not too worried about iPhones replacing real cameras quite yet (Just kidding, they already have. Why do you think I am so broke?)

Anyway, the show was great and I ended up with a couple of tiny shrimps (although they charged me for the regular sized shrimp!) If you are in NYC you can check it out until October 20th. As the name suggest it’s on 6th Ave, right next to the Tonight Show. Most of the art is super affordable as well so you can bring your family home some sort of stuffed meat and still have money to buy actual food.

Now click here to see all my iPhone photos from Lucy Sparrow’s Delicatessen on 6th!

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