Author Archives: admin

The iPhone Social Share Place for Photographers

Oh great… another photo sharing social network. And this one must by fly-by-night because the icon is a black camera stamp on a white background. Well, actually, it’s ‘the’ place to share if your serious about photography and expanding your ideas through the work of others. The simple entry just keeps the kids away.

EyeEm is a photo social app I had on my iPhone for a month before actually setting up a login. Now, it’s the place I go first for a fresh perspective. There isn’t pages and pages of self face shots or images to just get high ranking. Sure, there will be a few of those, but mostly it is folks from around the world that are there for the same reason, to try things and share.

The same as other options is the list of filters you can apply to a image, the difference EyeEm brings is the way you tag each photo by the Topic, Place and Event. So, you can quickly find a particular type of photography image to view one or many images in that group. A an app to use to be inspired by others with a like mind.

No, that isn’t me… just someone who has a nice group of pictures that says how I see the app. EyeEm does have a Web page interface too that you can log into via your desktop.

iPhone photo item for Buy Small Saturday

I seem to have missed, or it is actually a new thing, Saturday after Black Friday is ‘Buy Small’ day. The idea is that everyone who has bought all the big things with big discounts on Friday should buy at least one item from a small company.

Last year, on Kickstarter, a couple guys had a little plastic gadget they called the Glif. It is a tripod mount for the iPhone 4/4s. Rather a simple idea, the iPhone sits snuggly either in portrait or landscape mode for those shots you need to be really still. Yet, a quick little twist and the iPhone is free. No, it doesn’t work with any iPhones in a case and even a thin vinyl skin makes it a rather tight squeeze. These are still for sale on their site studioneat.com .

Visiting their site today, they have added to the original Glif. A package that includes: The Glif, Serif, and Ligature (no idea where they come up with these names!). It amounts to a Glif, a addition strap that wraps around the iPhone and Glif for a really solid lock on your tripod, and a keychain loop so you can keep your Glif with you handy. The keychain loop is neat, since you can use the Glif to hold your iPhone on the table for hands free viewing too, not just as a tripod mount.

iPhone social photo sharing app that wins on user experience design

Everyone should know by now that I post a lot to Instagram (look on the right column, at the bottom for last 20 posts), but there are many many more social photo sharing options than just the one. Sadly, most are just passing through and will be a lot of fun for a while then everyone will move on.

One that I found recently through a friend is Chumkee. While there is the usual finding of friends, post up pictures, comments and thumbs up for the photos you like. This option has a great interface for seeing what is new. The app starts up with a area of tossed together recent photos. You can tap on one to see more info or zoom in it, or flick is off the screen to be replaced with another.

One item of note, I’m finding more and more people are posting up little movies of themselves talking, singing or doing a stunt rather than just photos. It’s all for fun so take Chumkee as another option to share with friends no matter where they are around the world, through a much nicer interface. (update – just got a couple emails from readers… service doesn’t seem to be filtered so consider it ‘not safe for work’)

Movement effects for your iPhone Photos

Prior to my iPhone, I carried a variety of digital cameras. While quick and easy to shoot, I missed a few features that almost seemed easier using my older film cameras. Movement in an image was one of those features. The ‘better’ digital cameras did movement but the entry level units froze everything in time.

For the iPhone, there is Slow Shutter. Do you want to show movement going by like water over a waterfall or car taillights on the street below, it gets that handled.

Slow Shutter handles the other side of movement too… like a picture out the window of a plane or car where the foreground frame is still and the background moves by. The app provides a manual mode for you to completely control the shutter open time as well an automated option where you choose a length of time and how you want the movement handled and Slow Shutter does the rest. There is a single image result but the app holds many images that you can move through to adjust the final… like in the case of cars going by you can adjust at what point in the capture had the right amount of light trails.

Adding depth of view to iPhone Photos

For film camera, you can get lenses that have a pretty close depth of field so that everything outside of the distance you focus at is out of focus. This will create an image that is very focused on a subject much like if you were there and was looking at a specific spot.

For the iPhone, you can tap a particular area you want to have in focus when you shoot the shot but does not produce a very sharp change between in/out focus areas. A enhancement to add the depth effect to an image after it is taken is commonly called Tilt Shift.

There are a few photo enhancement app for the iPhone that allows you to add that Tile Shift effect, I’ll cover those later. The issue has long been that you have to add the effect in a circle or straight line. Which means that the object you want in focus has a area around it that should be out of focus but is still in focus. Most people won’t notice it if the image is small.

I just discovered an app, Finger Focus, which allows you to highlight the area you want in focus with your finger… like finger painting. Everything else will look further away. The app includes the ability to adjust the size of the finger ‘brush’, the amount of blur in the background and the transition area between the in focus and the blurry areas.

iPhone brings a film camera to your pocket

The days of choosing a 35mm film, a lens and the type of flash are not completely gone. While Hipstamatic doesn’t require you get the ‘f’ setting right or depth of field focus, it does offer a variety of yesteryear type choices. The output won’t be the super crisp photos of the big lens and big dollar cameras, rather it will give you the lower end experience of the bright spots and washed out colors of the not-so-perfect film cameras.

Hipstamatic comes with a variety of film types and lenses, as well a couple flash head styles. To choose, you just sweep your finger across the lens area side/side to change, and up/down to the film canisters. You can choose to use the flash or not.

You view through the little view finder window, snap your images… Hipstamatic takes a bit of time to create the image adds it to it’s own image roll. You can choose to have the photo also saved out to your iPhone’s Photo Library too. Sharing is done through the popular social services with the image including the specifics to the lens/film/flash you used. Additional film/lens combination packs are available through in-app purchase.

Real HDR for the iPhone, now with enhancements

High Dynamic Range… in case you where wondering what HDR was. The built in iPhone camera app has a option to shoot in entry level version of HDR in case you thought you had seen it before. Basically, you take a over bright and over dark image and merge them together so that the bright areas aren’t too bright and the dark areas aren’t blacked out. The effect works very well for inside of buildings and puffy clouds outside. There is a lot of other situations but those are the two types of shots you see most often by professional HDR photographers.

There are a lot of ‘fake’ HDR apps for the iPhone that take a single image and bring up the darker areas and add more contrast to the brighter areas. But, side-by-side, the read HDR will win for a photo that pops.

ProHDR is a app that I use a lot when the need arrises. It can either take the bright/dark images on it’s own or I can manually override the shutter. The app is another universal app so it works on your iPhone and iPad2 (needs a camera of course). And, it works in landscape or portrait views.

New in the update today is effect you can add within ProHDR to your HDR photos. No need to snap a shot and go to anther iPhone app to add an enhancement. Now, you can crop, add a filter, add a frame and add text, then save to your iPhone’s photo library.

Everything iPhone Photo

Where iPhone Photography has a home