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Cutting down the time of experimenting with iPhone Photography

There are options, oh so many options, when it comes to enhancing a photograph taken with an iPhone. From simple touch ups, cropping, adding filters, to advance curves and multi-imaging. For many folks, like me, it’s part of the fun with taking photos with the iPhone. There is tuning, testing, changes and learning. Even when an image looks about right, I’ll try something else just to see if I was missing anything. One image will end up with a dozen versions in my iPhone’s photo library.

To get a better idea of options and seeing suggestions from the pros, there is a book I found: Create Great iPhone Photos. You can find it at a variety of online and local book stores.

The book has it’s 200 pages of tips divided down into a few key areas:
iPhone Camera Essentials
Customize You riphone Camera
Photoshop in Your Pocket
Filters, Effects and Recipes
The Retro Look
Fun and Offbeat Effects
Snap – and Share
Your Photoblog
For Inspirations

Great gift idea if your know someone with an iPhone and a Photography interest –

 

Your iPhone pictures infused onto scratch resistant aluminum

There are a few options to have your iPhone pictures printed. There are services that will print your iPhone taken image onto a postcard and mail it. Most of the services lean towards square prints so you can do something with your Instagram and Hipstamatic images.

A new provider, PostalPix, is expanding on what others are offering. PostalPix will print your square images and mail to you or to someone else in the 4×4, 5×5 and 8×8 sizes. They also have the 4×6, 5×7 and 8×10 non-square printing covered. If your looking for using your images for a bit of art, PostalPix will infuse your images onto aluminum, all ready for the office or home walls. The free app handles everything from accepting your iPhone images, choosing the size and paper, aluminum or mousepad, to paying.

 

Hipster on the iPhone – New free holiday templates

There are many options in the land of sharing photos taken with your iPhone. Some have cool ways of finding friends to share with, others have unique user experiences for showing of your pics with. In the case of Hipster, the fun is how the image wrapped. Instead of square images like Instagram, Hipster has the images wide in order to fit on their electronic postcards. I say post cards not because they print and mail, rather because the user experiences is flipping the framed image over and writing on the back.

Other photographers on Hipster can see where you took the picture, like, and add text. There are many templates to frame your image with which include different locations for the location text. For the holidays, Hipster has added a few fun frame templates for your ‘postcard’ images.

Remote activation of the iPhone’s camera shutter

A technique I learned with my old film cameras was to snap photos with one hand holding the camera, usually so I could get a shot from up high looking down. Attempting this in the beginning with the iPhone proved to be challenging. I would miss tapping the button and this miss the shot. Then I found that the action to take an image using the iPhone was the release of the shutter button, not the pressing. Just sit my finger on the button, raise the iPhone up high and release when I wanted the shot.

It didn’t take long for the feature in camera apps to include the ability to tap anywhere on the screen to snap the photo. With iOS5 came the ability to use the + volume hardware button to snap photos. Cool feature… I just never remember to use it.

I will be covering a couple photo apps that work particularly better if your iPhone is in a tripod. Even with the iPhone in a tripod, tapping the up volume or screen can be enough to cause some garbage to be introduced into a photo shoot. Since my iPhone’s Apple headphones have a volume control, I tried snapping a photo using the + on the headphone wire… it works!! In fact, the photos snap pretty quickly using this method.

 

Hipstamatic camera for iPhone updated with Foodie SnapPak

When Hipstamatic came out, I had a tendency to not use it. While the ‘retro’ camera effect was fun for many shots, it took so long to get the image from snap to library, I moved on. The app offers all sorts of ‘lenses’, ‘films’, and ‘flashes’. Which, act as filters, but adds to the romance of photography. The setting up the shot prior to taking it rather than enhancing a photo afterwards.

The Hipstamatic app offers the lens/film/flash options in little bundles, or as they call them, ‘packs’. A new pack was released in time for the holiday dinners, Foodie SnapPak. The SnapPak bundle includes Loftus Lens, DC Film and Tasty Pop Flash. Below is an image I took without the flash on. The flash adds a washout to the white areas of the image to add to the effect. In my house, espresso is in the food group. The Foodie SnapPak is positioned around the photography of your feast food items.

 

Remembering contacts through their picture on the iPhone

Evernote has released a new free app they call ‘Hello’. The app is for exchanging Business cards. I’m not sure about ‘exchanging Business cards’, but it is a fun way of meeting people and exchanging contact information.

The idea is that you hand someone your iPhone, they fill in the slots for their contact info and snap a photo of themselves. You could enter the data for them and snap the picture if you would rather not hand someone your iPhone. You don’t have to have a picture of the person in order to create a contact, but then why would you put them in your visual contact app?

The folks you add to Evernote Hello are automatically synced and backed up to your regular free Evernote Cloud location so you can see the info on any device you have syncing to your account.

Can people legally tell you to not take a picture of something with your iPhone?

I snap pictures… pictures of just about everything. About the only exceptions are where I think I might make someone uncomfortable if I aim my iPhone camera at them. You can usually tell when someone doesn’t want their picture snapped. There are the general good rules of thumb too… don’t make parents uncomfortable by taking pictures of their kids without asking them, avoid trying to take pictures of things that have ‘no photos’ posted, and when your driving. I guess that is more than just one exception to the ‘take pictures of everything’.

I have heard that in some areas around the US, it is illegal to take pictures of people in public places. I have also heard that if the person in the photo is recognizable, you need to get a release signed. So many laws that might be laws or might be urban legends. Searching on the Internet doesn’t result in clear answers very quickly.

Luckily, I found Photographers Rights app. It has the rights of the photographer broken down by countries. The other areas, Your Rights, Copyright and Privacy has similar information, just divided down a bit differently so you can find the information you need quicker. I won’t be trying to use it to fight a court case about if I should or shouldn’t have taken a picture. It will be handy to double check anything that I am curious with little searching.

Making stereographic photos on the iPhone

I keep seeing these photos where a room has been wrapped around a center dot, some cool… some not the right room. I thought at first they were using panoramic software and pulling the lower part in to meet it’s self. While that is supported in some pano software (I’ll cover that in another post), I found how it’s done with a single shot.

Simply put, there is an app called Tiny Planet Photos. From a single iPhone photo, you can wrap the image into a circle with the bottom being the center point so the image looks like a small globe. Depending on the photo, this can be very cool. After the initial price of the software, it doesn’t cost anything to apply the effect to every iPhone photo quickly so it won’t take long to see what works and what doesn’t.

Another effect the same Tiny Planet Photos does is the reverse wrap, so that the outer edge it pulled around giving the photo a ‘tube’ effect.

 

Top Camera for iPhone gets 9 new HDR filters

I have mentioned HDR (high dynamic range) photography before… two photographs of bright and dark merged together for a single image. The photos can be rather energized since your able to see a full range in a single photo.

Previously, I talked about an app that snapped two photos and merged for you. The Top Camera app developers recognize that there isn’t always enough time to take the two photos and wait for the merge. The app offers true HDR photography, but with this update you can ‘fake’ it a bit. The app now comes with 9 filters across a range of HDR and Clarify enhancements. Each effect can be applied and then adjusted with a slider to get the desired impact you were looking for in the single image.