Meet Cindi Hobgood...
Cindi Hobgood is an artist. Her medium is the photograph, but her tool is not just a camera. It is the light, the camera, and the application of technological tools –specifically the iPhone/iPad and its applications – that result in images that capture more than just the subject, but Cindi’s vision of the world itself.
Ansel Adams said, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
Over the past three years, Cindi has found that making images on her iPhone and modifying and stylizing them using dozens of available applications for image editing, has reinvigorated her passion for photography and developed in her a desire to teach others about the possibilities of this emerging medium.
An award-winning photographer with more than 25 years of professional photography experience scouting locations for the film and television industry, Cindi is now focused on teaching other artists.
She teaches photographers to painters, professionals to amateurs at conferences, workshops, photo tours, and in the classroom at Montgomery College in Maryland. Her students learn how to use the iPhone and its applications as a sculptor would use clay.
The art form is called iPhoneography, and Cindi is a recognized talent.
The iPhone brings the camera, the lenses, the filters, the darkroom, and the digital editing software together in one single, accessible place. Throughout her career as a photographer, Cindi has logged many miles carrying cameras, lenses, and tripods on photo shoots, and then having to wait days or weeks to get back to the studio to see the results, Cindi felt electrified and inspired by the immediacy of the iPhone as artistic tool.
At first, as a teacher of traditional photographic techniques using only “cameras,” Cindi was uneasy about whether a cell phone could truly create “art,” but every day she found herself spending more hours using her iPhone camera than peering through the lens of her expensive DSLR. Her “camera” started collecting dust, while her iPhone grew home to a portfolio of original images. She has since added other lightweight, high-tech tools – the iPad, a micro-camera with excellent optics, and the latest iPhone – to her arsenal, but the focus remains on accessible, lightweight, digital imagery.
What else is art, but the creation of something new and inspired, regardless of the tools used to create it?
Now Cindi has thousands of images, years of experience, and hundreds of students who can attest to her expertise, not only as a “traditional” photographer, but as a teacher and expert in iPhoneography.
Cindi brings to her students more than 25 years of experience location scouting for the entertainment industry where she and her camera traveled to more than 20 states and 10 countries looking for the the perfect stage for the boy to kiss the girl, the battle to be waged, or the child to romp in the jungle. During the scouting process Cindi would photograph hundreds of locations in countless ways in order to translate a “sense of place” to the directors, production designers, and cinematographers on a given project.
From the early 1990s through today, Cindi has scouted locations for more than 175 projects, including Separate But Equal, The Patriot, Jungle Book, The Notebook, Dear John, The Amazing Race and Wheel of Fortune; working for Paramount, Columbia Pictures, Disney, New Line Cinema, HBO, United Artists, Republic Pictures, and Sony among others.
The technical elements of film scouting and location management have helped Cindi hone her photography and leadership skills. She has the eye of a travel photographer, the quickness of a photojournalist, the artistry of a landscape photographer… and now the powerful suite of tools in the iPhone to create art right “on set.”
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Cindi studied photography at UNC Chapel Hill in the Radio, Television, Motion Picture department. She went on to study at Savannah College of Art and Design and, in 1989, headed to California to attend Brooks Institute of Photography.
Cindi Hobgood is a member of Destination DC (the Washington, DC Convention and Tourism corporation) and Women Photojournalists of Washington.
