Lagos in black and white, through the lens of a Samsung S7 Edge

Published in

TechCabal Africa

5 min readApr 1, 2016

I was in the middle of an immersive creative “hackathon” when the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge review unit came to me. Playable City Lagos was really immersive, and it was hard to get a moment to really play with the device. But that was okay because I had a brainwave.

One of the great things about Playable City is that it brings all kinds of creatives into the same space. Of the ten-person group, at least three were artists whose primary medium was photography. I thought I noticed something special about the S7 Edge’s camera, so I invited Logor Olumuyiwa to take pictures with it on one of our outings.

When he returned, I was amazed. Logor had taken hundreds of pictures, to which he had applied his special monochrome perspective.

These images have not been touched up with Photoshop, I must point out. They all come directly from the phone.

None of the images that I’ve selected to show you have undergone any desktop processing. They are coming straight from the device, the only filter being Logor’s black and white one.

This is what Logor had to say about the experience of practising his art with a phone, and not a DSLR, like he is accustomed to.

Shooting from a phone is daunting — A DSLR grip spoils you and anything smaller becomes a fidgety control. For street photography, a phone aids invisibility and provides the opportunity for candid, natural and emotional shots — but I don’t shoot from a phone at least not until Bankole had the idea that I review the Samsung S7 edge camera on the streets of Lagos!
The Samsung S7 edge has a fast camera with amazing ISO and aperture settings that I never thought was possible for a phone, coupled with editing possibilities and rich in size and quality of the photographs from macro detailed shots to Landscape panoramic street photography! Impressive! It blurs the line between the feeling of using a phone and a proper DSLR.
Monochrome Lagos sets out to photograph Lagos, and seeks to capture what I often refer to as the mystic of the city — the theatrical arrangement of almost everything; the architecture, the poetic juxtapositions of its residents, how they relate with the city and vice versa. Monochrome Lagos seeks the beauty in her forms, lines, patterns, and texture by stripping the city of one of the its most obvious features. Colour.
The question I set out to ask with my photography is “if I strip Lagos of the color, what will I find?” What I found, with the help of the Samsung S7 edge, was quite fascinating.

Alright. Let’s look at some more photos.