Nina Hauser’s exhibit “With My iPhone and Eye” marvelously illustrates the principle that the human element remains paramount in art, irrespective of technology.

There’s an imaginative richness to the 22 black-and-white and color photographs in this local photographer’s WSG Gallery display, along with technique and skill.

“I love my iPhone camera,” says Hauser of her art form. “It’s so simple… no dials, no lenses, no distractions. It allows me to stop the action in the business of my life. It’s not just getting the shot in focus, but choosing what to focus on.

“My iPhone is a little portable darkroom, and with the multitude of apps I have found in iTunes, I can get creative with filters and post-processing because I can do it quickly, and all on one device.”

Simply said, but certainly not simply done. For what Hauser is doing is actually a modified throwback to one of the earliest forms of photography, the pinhole photographic process, gussied up 21st century style.

Pinhole photography is an art whose roots go all the way back to antiquity, but whose heyday is more closely recognized as flourishing at mid-19th century. Using a light-proof container with a lens opening, light passes from this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the container. The resulting images can be sharp or ghostly.

Hauser achieves roughly this same effect with her use of iPhone apps.

“Some (aaps) are useless,” she says, “most are fun, and a large number are wonderful. With a wide range of apps installed on my iPhone, I can create moody color images, atmospheric landscapes, painterly portraits, vintage looking architecture, images in black and white—whatever my mind can conceive or find by chance.”

The result is a series of photographs whose moody textures heighten the already dramatic visage of her compositions. And like much earlier pinhole photographs, the larger part of Hauser’s effort is a mixture of initial inspiration and hard follow-up.

As she recently told WSG’s Valerie Mann in an interview in conjunction with her WSG exhibit, Hauser’s use of her iPhone has accelerated the use of her equipment.

“When I take pictures with my iPhone,” Hauser told Mann, “I do it using various apps and it is great fun, challenging, creative. I can play with filters, light, colors, format; so I can see what I’m creating right at the moment of conception and I can keep redoing them and saving them until one strikes the right chord.”

Accomplished photographer that she is, each of Hauser’s images reflect a keen eye nuanced to the formal structure of art photography. And Hauser fine-tunes her art to her emotional state.

A first among equals, her “Choir of Birches; St. Gaudens Home, Cornish, New Hampshire” is a fitting example of Hauser’s current art. This accomplished landscape photo finds Hauser melding her innate sensibility to her expertise. And what might have been overwrought in another medium is instead inspired as a series of technological and aesthetic choices.

“Choir of Birches” focuses on two-near parallel stands of birch trees flanking each other on a dirt country road. A serene photograph, the work is supplemented by chromatic accents whose palette subtly heightens the appearance of the trees and surrounding vegetation with a slightly sharper than average complementary contrast between lights and darks.

The work is an imaginative countryside whose swaying trees indeed seem to have an unusually inspired spiritedness. “Choir of Birches” is also a superior example of what human and machine can accomplish in harmony.

For each image in this superlative display reflects this contemporary technical blending. But real wonder is ultimately simple — what the eye sees always comes first.

“Nina Hauser: With My iPhone and Eye” will continue through May 4 at WSG Gallery, 306 S. Main St. Gallery hours are noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday; noon-9 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. For information, call 734-761-2287.