iPhone photos with Rando, opposite of Snapchat, the fun of sharing and receiving

Snapchat offers you the ability to snap a photo with the iPhone and send it to a single person or a group of people. Those receiving the image in the app can view for a short, assigned amount of time and then it disappears. Other apps are known for their filters to apply to photos, prior to sharing with the public to see. Many popular iPhone photo sharing solutions encourage the building of friends to view and comment on your photos.

Rando offers a different view on sharing photos. A one to one share and receive. No importing photos, no editing, no resizing, no liking, no followers and no comments. The interface is simple and clean, as is the action of sharing and viewing photos. After verifying an email address, the app offers a round viewfinder window and a shutter button. Snap a quick shot, then decide to share by tapping the shutter again or retaking via the ‘x’ in the upper left corner.

After a photo is shared, a short time goes by, then a Gray dot at the top of the page turns Red. Drag the screen down to view an image someone else shared. Who? No idea. If you take a few pictures quickly, each one results in Rando providing an equal amount of images back to you from others around the world. The ability to take a picture and view photos from others requires an Internet connection.

Tap a photo to find out where the image was shared from. You can choose to not allow Location Services on photos you share, which is what I did at first. But, it appears they are only sharing a general location as fun info rather than specifics like others that pinpoint my house when I post my pup in the back yard. If you allow alerts from Rando, you will get a pop up where your photo went to and when one comes in, where it came from.

Rando doesn’t offer any tuning of photos, a method to ID photos or specify what type of photos you want to receive. If you double tap on a photo, you will have the option to delete the photo or flag it as inappropriate. If you don’t delete, the new ones continue to add above the earlier that you can flip thought later.

If you give Rando permission to access the iPhone photo library, full 2448 x 2448 square images will be saved. All photos round centered in a white square frame. OK… back to snapping, it’s amazing how addictive photo sharing is when there is no expectation to entertain for points or likes.

UPDATED: The Rando app was just updated (06.09.2013). Now you can swipe the list of incoming photos to see the list of photos you have submitted. Tapping a photo will show where in the world the photo was sent to.

Photo social sharing services – here yesterday, gone today

When Kevin Rose sold Digg and started his own social sharing service under the company name of Milk, we all watched with anticipation for what was possible from someone who has had a close relationship with the public for a very long time. His company’s app had us sharing photos and experiences, instead of being locked into an overall location. All was fun till Google offered Kevin a job and he pulled the plug.

The key to many photo as well as document apps, is the cloud backend that is needed for others to see your creations. When the provider pulls the plug on the hosting, the app on your iPhone generally becomes useless. Some still allow creation and editing, but the method to get the resulting item out of the app has been removed. And, with that, so is the social groups a person had built up.

With so many options, it is easy to miss going to one when another is getting a lot of attention from others so there are things to comment on. You know, the social side of social media.

Last week I visited two apps that I thought I had more recently used, but discovered it must have been months… oh how time flies by!

For a few months, everyone was getting into the Gif sharing. Apps to create and apps to share where everywhere a person looked on Photography sites. Perhaps Vine with it’s sharing of a 6 second movie helped lighten the visits to the many Gif sharing solutions. One that had a nice selection of short moving images that appeared to be from some very creative people was Gifture.

When I launched the app, there was non of my posts or other people’s posts available anymore. In this case though, perhaps it will return some day, the developer’s promise. When it returns, will the users return… since they already got burned once.

Another photo sharing app that actually got a lot of attention in tech groups of folks was Hipster. Their idea was that a person created ‘digital postcards’ via snapping a photo and having a frame applied with location text. Find friends and share ‘postcards’ within Hipster for others to enjoy. I didn’t really dive into the app’s social pond very deeply as there was almost no posts by folks close to me and those far away where not posting very regularly. Yet, the app continued to get press as being the place to be.

Launching the app now results in all areas and pages being blank. The Hipster Web site tells a bit of the story:

“Hipster says goodbye.

There’s an old saying that says that “all good things must come to an end”, and its with a mixture of a lot of emotions – gratitude, sadness, and excitement for the future – that we’re letting you know that Hipster will be shutting down as of February 16th, 2013.

You’ll have until that date to save whatever postcards you’d like to keep – after that, all of the postcards you’ve sent through Hipster, and the accounts you’ve created will be deleted.

The decision to shut down Hipster was not an easy one. Over the last 18 months, over 500,000 people have joined our community, sent some amazing postcards, and made some real friendships. However, given the combination of many things – the state of today’s photosharing landscape, financial considerations, and speed of the growth of the community – we decided that now was the appropriate time to end the great experiment that is Hipster.”

So, what is the responsibility to your customers? Gone are the days of the little corner photo processing booth going out of business and the neighborhood having to drive a bit further. Social services effect people globally, both in their time as well as relationships that were created and now lost. Generally, there is no other way to contact someone outside of the provider’s solution. Will people start to be more cautious about joining in on the promise of fun amongst new friends when the relationship connection requires an outside party with only the hopes of an income stream in the game?

The classic fun of chemical processing photos brought to the iPhone

During my early 35mm film shooting days, I shot a lot to learn about the impacts of changing camera/lens settings. Rather than having to pay a local lab to process my film, I had the chemicals and a dark closet to do the work myself. Printing the negatives onto paper required equipment beyond my budget and available room in the closet. A local school and a couple kind lab owners let me use their equipment for passing light through those negatives onto special paper in a controlled environment where I mixed and adjusted my chemicals and timing of processes. That is to say, there is a lot of room for being creative when making paper prints of my film photography. Of course, now we use a lot of filters and digital tuning before sending to a printer that applies ink a dot at a time onto paper.

If you want a bit of creative fun without the smell or chance of burning your cloths, give the iPhone app Koloid a try.

No, the app isn’t something you will start taking all your pictures with. With it’s feature limitations, the app is all about having fun being a bit unpredictable. Koloid starts with a view finder to snap the photo… options around the screen include Settings, turning the Flash on/off, Shutter and the built in Gallery. Be aware that you don’t have a big budget with the app so you couldn’t afford color paper, the resulting image will be Black and White.

After you snap the shot, the first step is to adjust the collodion. The higher number will process the photo quicker but is less precise. Like, running strong chemicals and moving fast vs weaker and taking extra time to get a more detailed result.

Shaking the iPhone introduces a blob of photo developers chemical. Since the iPhone doesn’t have smell-a-vision, you will need to imagine a bit of thick heavy smell to match up with the yellow area on the screen. Tipping the iPhone will cause the Koloid processing chemical to move around the white area, exposing the black and white photo. If the chemical sits on an area of the photo too long, it will go fully black. There is no way to ‘undo’ a chemical burn on the image so use the movements smoothly to adjust the photo ‘print’ dark and light areas.

Popular photo social share services are supported. Photos are saved to Koloid’s own gallery and optionally auto save to your iPhone photo library. If you want to share directly from the app, choose one of the options, add some text and send. When your done, the lower left camera button returns you to the view finder screen.

There is a settings area to decide if your shooting square photos, need a grid overlay, geotagging and more. As you will see in the final photo in the post, I have not been able to not have the date on the finished photos.

Of course, your milage will vary. Below is a quick image I snapped and ‘treated’ with Koloid where I didn’t overdo any areas. Since you can’t import photos or ‘undo’, the process is very much to being down to your last piece of photo paper in the lab… the pressure is on.

Analog Camera, lack of features doesn’t make an app minimalistic

RealMac Software has been producing Mac software for many years. Their first iOS app was Clear, which introduced users to a new way to interact with their iPhones in the area of Task Lists. With the exception of typing the text of the task, all actions in the app are via swipes and pinches. Clear has no buttons.

Today, RealMac released ‘Analog Camera‘, a minimalistic iPhone camera app. After a bit of time using the app to snap photos around the campus, I started questioning the line between lack of features and minimal interfaces.

Launch the app and your presented with an active view finder. There is also a row of images from your iPhone’s photo library across the top of the screen. From this starting screen, tap the shutter button to snap a square photo right away. Or, drag the screen down to select a photo previously taken for editing.

Many posts I read today talked about how Analog Camera is a one hand iPhone camera enhancement app. Where this line of thinking slips is the feature to have a separate focus and exposure spot. To go from the default auto focus, tap on the screen with two fingers, then drag each item around the screen. This of course means you need to use a second hand to do the tapping. Perhaps, RealMac could get away from this by always having a manual focus circle in the center of the screen, tap the screen once to have a Exposure point box appear and use.

Snapping a photo will add the image to the iPhone photo library, shown in the area above the viewfinder right away. Tap an image to be taken to the Analog Camera’s 8 filter options. 8 is no where close to as many as other apps have, but the group is slight tweaks rather than major alterations so the original photos are recognizable.

Selecting any of the options will expand the image with filter applied to full screen. Tap the screen to return to the picker. The buttons below the image are for saving the filtered image to the iPhone camera roll, Open In to move the image to another app for further editing or using in documents, and attach to an email.

The social share buttons appear depending on which are set up in the iPhone, between Twitter and Facebook. Though Analog Camera only takes square pics, it doesn’t feed directly to any of the other popular photo sharing services beyond the two Facebook/Twitter services built into the iOS.

Streamzoo update lets you share your photos faster

Streamzoo is a photo social share service I have covered in detail before. It is one of the places I post and see the world via other people’s shares. As a reminder, the service leans more towards ‘streams’ that are basically hashtags, meaning the experience is a bit different from just following a long list of people.

The update this week is for letting a person post photos faster by being able to jump around the included photo edit tools. Normally, you can snap a photo, import from your iPhone’s photo library, or create a collage. After a photo is selected, the normal path takes a person through cropping, frames, filters and other enhancements.

The update first shows up via the little dots in each of the options to bring in photos. Swiping across the bar changes the action of the buttons. The middle changes from importing and going through the steps, to an ‘express’.

Streamzoo’s Express jumps past the edit options to the posting screen. Here you can enter a title and hashtags, or post without either. Also, pulling down on the screen exposes the photo that will be shared. Since I normally shoot and edit outside of Streamzoo, these changes mean a lot of saved time from launch to share!

Those ‘cute’ doodles for photos from A Beautiful Mess

A Beautiful Mess for the iPhone and iPad is not one of those apps to put sun glasses on a photo of the dog or hats and beards on party snapshots. Instead, much like the theme of the site by the same name, the additions for photos are a touch more mature, yet still fun for all ages.

Like so many of the new photography editing apps showing up, you have to buy all but the few initial group of simple highlights. Unlike those others though, A Beautiful Mess isn’t initially free though, so there is a charge to use what others would offer for free, making money also on all of the additional goodies.

Start the app with either one of your photos or use one of the included backgrounds. Crop, then dive into the editing area. First up is a small group of filters. Filtering effects on your photos is best left to other apps you may already have, that isn’t what the app is about.

Borders are next, the area starts off with Border groups that can be purchases. Below that are the included options, tap one to apply. The frames can not be moved around, but across the bottom of the screen is a color selector. Either use the ‘x’ to remove and move on or the check to save.

Non of the frames are required, you can just move past those that don’t match the look your going for. Next is the Front/text area to type your message – again starting with upgrades to purchase and s small group included.

The ‘big’ feature that makes the A Beautiful Mess app match up to the Web site is the Doodles. The list of available Doodles is much longer than other bits options in the app. These are doodles drawn by the actual pair of owners for the site. These can be placed, twisted, resized and colored (from a set group of colors picker).

The final options in A Beautiful Mess are a set of words to apply. Again, there are two sets of Phrase bundles to pay extra for. When your all done, you can save the photos to your iOS photo library and share directly from the app too. The finished images are much smaller in size than the original, fine for sharing or posting in your Web site, but wont work well for printing on cards.

Oh yea, the backgrounds included in A Beautiful Mess:

3 Shot Bracket Photography Comes To The iPhone with PureShot

I have covered HDR photography here before. The iPhone camera and many apps take two photos at different exposure settings and merge the images to lighten the dark and make the light areas really pop. That of course is over simplified, I’m not going for an HDR lesson in this post.

When a person finds an HDR photo on the Internet, there are three types. The basic two image merge like what is found with the iPhone’s built in camera app, there are enhanced HDR where an app is used to alter a single image for the effect and finally the images produced by a digital camera. The digital camera version usually has more natural looking lighting but everything has more vivid contrasts. The images are closer to what we see with our eyes instead of through the limitations of a smartphone camera lens unable to collect all the differences an eye can.

The digital camera version is partially due to ‘better’ or ‘specialized’ equipment… not many digital cameras have games on them or allow to be used to call mom. And, instead of two images merged, the camera captures 3 images, most common called ‘Bracketed’. The images are 3 photos taken quickly after each other so they align, but at different exposure settings. Then, via a desktop app, the photos are merged together and enhanced or cleaned up. The 3 bracket photos providing much more contrasting information to work with than only 2.

On the iPhone, app developers attempt to do the whole process of HDR so they keep it within the power of the iPhone edit capabilities, only collecting and merging two photos.

PureShot was recently updated with the feature of snapping 3 Bracket shots to be used with desktop editing software rather than being all things to all people.

The app still has more features and gadgets than the average iPhone photographer will need. But, if you are looking for more control over taking the photo and less worried about having to edit later, PureShot is the tool to be in your iPhone Camera Bag. Complete control over focus and exposure points, being able to lock both along with the focus point. The app collects a lot of data with the photo too so sharing has data that most other apps will happily use.

If you dip into the Menu area of Pureshot, choose Shutter Settings, then Shutter fires, you will be given the options to have your iPhone (via PureShot, not when using the iPhone’s default camera app) capture a single image, 3-Shot Burst, or 3-Shot Bracket. Use the 3-Shot Bracket if your going after collecting 3 images for editing into a high quality HDR photo via your desktop computer.

Now, when looking through PureShot’s viewfinder, you will notice the addition of a ‘2’ and ‘3’ spot. Just drag those to contrasting exposure spots on the area you are going to photograph. Perhaps ‘2’ to the darkest area and ‘3’ to the brightest (don’t forget to tap the screen to focus!). When the big orange shutter button is tapped, 3 Shots will be taken with about 2 seconds between each. The slight delay allows the camera to adjust to the different exposures rather than an over all photo and attempting to fill in later. There are three small dots next to the shutter button that change from colored to blank as the three shots are taken and saved to the iPhone photo library. Now, export the three photos to your favorite HDR app on your computer and create some real bracket HDR images.

Even owning Instagram, Facebook continues to update photos on the iPhone app

There was a lot of excitement around Facebook purchasing Instagram. Initially, the curiosity of what will become of Instagram, another ‘buy and close’ or the evil merging of systems so a person’s Instagram data is now available for Facebook to market with. The extent of how Facebook is using the Instagram user list is still being watched, but the two services do continue to operate separately in the eyes of the casual users so both get updates to expand their particular path forward.

In yesterday’s iPhone Facebook app update, the photos area was enhanced with more ways to use and share photos posted onto the service.

Previously, a posted photos could be liked, tagged with a person’s ID and commented on, all with icons on the edge of the photo.

The addition of a ‘…’ next to the tag icon and new ‘See More’ text next to the photos description text seems like a simple update to the Facebook app. These both greatly enhance the user experience of viewing and sharing photos through the iPhone though.

Selecting the ‘See More’ opens up the photos’ description text to show the name of the photographer and timestamp.

Selecting the ‘…’ provides access to additional things you can do with the photo. Directly from a photos, you can make it your Facebook Profile picture. Also Saving the image to your iPhone’s photo area and Sharing. With Sharing, you are presented with a text box and the options to share: on your own timeline, on a friend’s timeline, in a group and on your page. Everything to make showing your pictures to other easier.

A solution for those times your looking for a photography idea

There is a variety of reasons to shoot photos. Something as simple as a social share or a snap at a family trip, all the way to large format art or marketing photography. To see what others are doing, for a few ideas, a person can simply wander around any of those social sites. To help pulling ideas together and offer daily challenges is an app, Photography Assignment Generator.

There are multiple versions of the app; an iPad version and iPhone version for photography ideas where your using a camera. There is also a version for iPhone photographers. Each app offers the option to choose an area on your own or have the app generate a daily challenge. I lean more towards finding shooting opportunities in the area I’m in rather than a general idea and then look for a area to match the need, so spent a couple days drilling down to particular areas.

Photography Assignment Generator will give you a daily challenge with reminders, the app will pick a challenge for the moment for you, or you can choose an area of challenges on your own. While the content is very nice, the user interface is very non-Apple. The buttons appear to be from an old Palm app and sliding the left back button results in the screen changing to the right. I do like that the whole database for the app is downloaded to the iPhone so I don’t have to worry about an Internet connection to view assignments.

Tap a category to view the challenge in that area. There are over 75 assignments which can be mixed and matched. On the iPhone version, iPhotography Assignment Generator, there is a Camera+ and Instagram Tutorial. Both are actually feature overviews of the apps, with the Instagram option having screen shots from an older version of Instagram.

Selecting one of the images takes you to a larger version of the photo and a tip for creating a similar photo. Options are available to move through the other examples in the area or close to return to the challenge. In the full version, there are hundreds of examples to gets the ideas going.

Everything iPhone Photo

Where iPhone Photography has a home

The classic fun of chemical processing photos brought to the iPhone

Streamzoo update lets you share your photos faster

3 Shot Bracket Photography Comes To The iPhone with PureShot

A solution for those times your looking for a photography idea