Brennan Storr's "Largely the Truth": Photo Gallery: The Lonesome Creepy

Of all the things that smartphones can do - help us cheat at pub trivia nights or avoid having to talk to strangers, for example - their greatest feature has to be the camera. Having a reasonably capable camera in your pocket at all times is useful when your friends and associates decide to do something blackmail-worthy or when, like me, you’re walking around at three in the morning and say, “That looks spooky.” Portability, and the fact that it does all the heavy lifting for you as far as settings are concerned, has allowed me to use my iPhone to capture images I never would have bothered with if I'd had to lug around a camera the size of Optimus Prime's lower 48.

In the year I’ve been playing with the iPhone camera, first on a 3GS then a 4, I’ve learned how to deal with at least some of its shortcomings - low light photography, for example, and how even at its best it cannot hold a candle to even an entry level DSLR – and my pictures have improved considerably. Having a helpful smack on the ear every now and then from a close friend who is an actual photographer (as opposed to myself, a guy who likes taking pictures – this is an important distinction) has also been invaluable. Now, for my first post of 2012, I’d like to share some of my images with readers.

The following ten photos, unless otherwise noted, were taken with an iPhone 4. As a collection I’d taken to calling the images “In Absentia” because of a deliberate emptiness in each, sometimes the result of taking the shot on one of my nocturnal rambles and sometimes just a lucky shot during the day.

Then a good friend of mind said in the comments section that I have a knack for finding "the lonesome creepy" in things and the name stuck.