Tamara read an article by a photographer who used the Provoke iPhone app, so I took a look and got the app. The name of the app comes from the hugely influential street photographer Daido Moriyama who started a photo magazine named Provoke.

His black and white photos are instantly recognisable because he pushes the contrast and the grain.

The Provoke App

The Provoke app for iOS can be as provocative as you like because it has settings that emulate different amounts of contrast like this high contrast shot of the entrance to St John’s Wood Tube Station.

But it also has settings for less contrast, like the second photo below, looking out from a cafe on Upper Regent Street in London, and the third photo of leaves around a tree.

And for a phone app, I think the lower contrast simulation does a good job of rendering black and white tones to make a decent photo within the limitations of the sensor.

Colour intensity syndrome doesn’t exist as a term yet, unless I have just coined it by writing this.

Either way, what it means is that other people’s photos always look more colourful than my own.

I got it this morning from watching a video from Omar Gonzalez Photography, who was experimenting with an OM-3 camera and saying how colourful the photos looked.

So I grabbed my Fuji X-T50 and walked down the street, first passing a greengrocers and then a small disused graveyard next to a church, looking for colour.

Would my camera do the job or would I have to sell everything and get an OM-3?

OK, the Fuji passes muster. But that is just today. Tomorrow will bring another problem, and this syndrome is a never-ending problem that feeds on so much in this image-rich world.

This is a painting I saw in the National Portrait Gallery a few days ago. It is entitled El Borracho, Zarauz, and was painted in 1910 byJoaquín Sorolla.

El borracho means the drunkard, and the scene is set in Zarautz, a coastal town in the Basque Country, in Spain.

The text to the side of the painting say that the man’s friends are pushing another glass in front of the drunkard, who sits with a watery gaze.

We can see the glass held in front of the drunkard.

It’s easy to imagine how he is sitting and what the world looks like through his drunken eyes, the unsteadiness with which he looks into some imagined distance.

But if the painting had been named The Prophet, I might have read a different expression in the man.

The man on the left, looking straight back at the viewer, well his expression changes too, depending on how we read the scene.

And the expression of the man holding the drink, he is attentive because he wants to get every drop of wisdom from the prophet.