You know that girl; the one you shamelessly Facebook stalk at the end of August. Her summer album is absolutely the coolest. The bright colors and cool poses make a normal beach photo look like a shot by a “Teen Vogue” photographer. Your finger increases its speed and frequency as you click away on your mouse. You look up and realize you’ve already gone through 250 pictures. And then you remember. You don’t even know her. Many of us find ourselves in this awkward situation all of the time. But who can help but marvel?

Sophomore Ashley has it all; thousands of Facebook friends, an ongoing 365 day project, a huge Tumblr following and enough creativity to avoid writing “classic” as the caption for every photo she uploads.

Equipped with just a 4G iPhone, she’s been commanding the Facebook newsfeed for the past three years. Her planking pictures are truly enviable and her “muploads” (mobile uploads) capture the randomness that often occurs in the hallways. Often, her editing talents make you stop and question whether they were actually taken on an iPhone.

“I have over 3,000 photos on my photo album right now. I often upload them onto my laptop,” said Ashley. “On the weekends or during the summer, I can take up to about 30 or 40 a day, but around five during the weekdays or at school.”

Though these pictures often cannot compete with work done by real cameras, there is a certain appeal of iPhone applications. Ashley explains the convenience of immediately capturing the moment with your phone, especially when her style is much more spontaneous.

“Often a larger camera isn’t easy enough to just pull out and take a picture of an interesting pose. It just happens more naturally with the iPhone.”

With 169 followers on the popular photography application Instagram, senior Sheriden is also an iPhone professional photographer.

Like Ashley, Sheriden believes in spontaneity when taking pictures on the iPhone. Overly edited pictures can often look too overdone and lose a lot of their beauty, but Lilley chooses to only enhance the color and brightness of the picture, rather than modify it too much and end up darkening the picture.

“You can tell if someone has gone out of their way to move things around. I know you didn’t really just take that picture randomly,” Sheriden said.

Sheriden refers to Instagram as inspiration while Ashley uses her Facebook friends and tumblr.com. The social aspect of the applications aided both in the development of their own personal style.

Mobile photography is now a budding new art form, and the new blog “iPhoneography” should be thanked for this. The website reports on all things in the world of photography and videography apps, including upcoming events and exhibitions. One such event is the Fifth Annual iPhone Photography Awards, otherwise known as the IPPAs, which have already begun accepting photos for the 2012 competition.

In a world where the more money signs you have in a photo album name determines how artsy you are, times are tough for those of us not blessed with the creativity gene. But for Sheriden and Ashley, who are bestowed with natural gifts of artistry and vision, they do not need an extremely interesting album names (though they do have them): they have already won us over with their work. And sometimes, as we’re viewing one great photo after another, we may even feel like we do know them.

Sheriden said, “I don’t know this person, I don’t know what they do, I don’t know how old they are, I don’t know anything about them. But I can easily tell who they are through their pictures.”

Ashley and Sheriden have agreed to share their wisdom with those of us less talented with the camera. Their descriptive accounts walk us through their choices in technique and editing and give us explanation to why their iPhone pictures are the most talked about photo on your newsfeed.

– Katie