Stringer: Daily Photo Walks

We walk the same streets every day and stop seeing them. A stringer, the freelance correspondent of a small paper, can't afford that: every walk has to bring back a frame. Stringer gives you that job.

Before you go out, the editor of a district paper sends a telegram: one ordinary thing to shoot. A door, a pigeon, a puddle, a shadow, with a twist: from knee height, the shabbiest one on your way, with the sky in it. You shoot it with the phone's own camera, write one line under it, and it's printed as a newspaper halftone. On Sunday the week's frames come out as an issue. Free, no ads, no account, no internet.

📨 THE TELEGRAM
• Tell the editor what it's like outside and a telegram comes on a yellowish form, the task pasted on in strips of tape
• 1271 assignments in ten rubrics: Chronicle, City fauna, Weather & sky, Greenery, On the move, Signs & letters, the Correspondent's own, Textures, Finds, Colour & shape
• Three years of daily walks without a single repeat
• The season, the weather and the evening light decide what can come: a leaf on a car in autumn, drops on a window in the rain, a lit window after dusk
• Every telegram carries an «or»: no cat in the window? Any cat. A walk never fails
• Not feeling it? Ask for another one; the editor grumbles in red pencil and sends it

📷 THE PROOF
• The phone's own camera opens, no camera permission needed
• The frame comes back screened like newsprint: black dots on a 45° grid, or four-colour dots in colour print
• Or no screen at all, one frame at a time or all of them
• One line under the frame, as in a paper: no caption, no print
• Every filed frame gets the editor's stamp and a line in the margin

🗞 THE SUNDAY ISSUE
• The week's frames laid out under your paper's masthead: the front-page photo with its caption as the headline, the rubrics two frames to a row
• The week's weather in a box, small ads where a rubric is still empty
• Share it as an image, or print it on A4 sheets, never cutting a frame in two
• Write your own articles, with a photo or without; they run as a rubric of their own

🔎 INVESTIGATIONS
• Long assignments for weeks of walks: every letter of the alphabet on the district's signs, the digits 0–9, twelve doors, ten cats
• Fill the slots in any order, whenever one turns up
• At dusk a red «flash» may come in: the editor wants the evening light before it goes

🪪 THE PRESS CARD
• Ranks from trainee to chief of the district
• A stamp for every issue and your frames by rubric
• The bound volume: every issue so far, bound by year
• Two papers: the district weekly sends the plain twists, the big-city daily mixes in the trickier ones

ALSO
• Name your paper and sign your frames
• English and Russian
• Free and open source (MIT)

Privacy: no account, no ads, no analytics, no internet permission, no camera permission. Your frames stay in the app's private files on your phone.