Hipstamatic Retro Pak 3 on sale this weekend only!

After I discovered and posted about the new Silver Lake film/lens pak in Hipstamatic, I received an email saying that the whole RetroPak is on sale this weekend too. 99 cents for the full pack of 3 lenses and 6 films, purchasable through the app on your iPhone.

0 hipstamatic retro 3 pak 2

This is the complete list of the lenses and film in the RetroPak Three. If you want to deep dive into what each film and lens effect is, either view through the iPhone Hipstamatic app (tap on the shopping cart), or jump over to the Web Site where there are examples of many mix and matched for fun vintage effects.

0 hipstamatic retro 3 pak

Does Albumatic have the friends photo album share figured out?

The iPhone has a camera, it has social solutions to post photos to and it many options to group photos and friends. The trick has been how to get all of the bits to come together in a way that is actually usable. Recently I was reminded of a early solution that allowed photos to be grouped by an event, it had it’s limitations around friend grouping along with a few other layout issues. In the world of apps, it was several years ago so the name has gone from my memory.

It seems everyone has made an attempt at providing a solution. Apps like Flock have ‘smarts’ built in around how and who should see the photos so there is less burden on the users. Other apps try gain usage through a unique interface for adding, sorting and viewing. It’s a huge challenge to find the magic sauce which will pull people in to use.

Albumatic is an app that has risen to being noticed not by setting new records in the number of our friends using it. Rather, in the area of the types and amount of investors that have jumped onboard to help the app grow. It’s strengths are the ability to build an album that others can be alerted to. They can then view and add their own images… which pretty much sounds like the marketing behind all of the other iPhone photo album sharing apps.

It appears from my first testing that if the album is location based, others can’t add photos without being close by. Other options are location based only by name and I ended up with pictures from other events. ‘Friends’ don’t have to be at the event to enjoy the photos, only to post (I like that). Those that are viewing (joined) the album are available via the app to the Album creator so it is easy to see who is watching along and who isn’t. Time will tell if Albumatic becomes the location photo album solution of choice. Once again, a free app that will have to pay the bills somehow once the VC money runs out, will it be location based ads?

Hipstamatic heads to Silver Lake with new lens and film pak

It’s been a little while since I have seen a new film/lens pak from Hipstamatic so this morning’s update was a nice surprise.

01 Silver Lake Hipstapak

The new Silver Lake HipstaPak contains a film and lens that gives a histaminic 126 film era result. I shot plenty of those 126 packs of film and remember too well that any bit of bright light would burn all over the final image. Now, Hipstamatic offers a 99 cent solution to get the effect when shooting the image from the start rather than the mystery of those little cartridge film cameras.

03 Silver Lake Hipstapak

04 Silver Lake Hipstapak

05 Silver Lake Hipstapak

iPhone Panoramic photos become movies – all on the iPhone

Built into the iPhone’s camera app is the ability to take pictures of tall buildings, wide for the interiors of a restaurant, simple HDR for vivid lights and even wrap around panoramic images. All of this ‘built-in’ so why do we need apps for taking pictures outside of what Apple provided? Mostly, because one solution isn’t the ‘best’ solution for everyone. Photos taken and left exactly as they are is fine, but many times there is a vision of what the photo could be so why not tune the image a bit.

In the world of panoramic photography, there has been a nice list of app options, each with their own way of doing the action of taking the photos. The early solutions required a person snap a photo then align the next photo with the previous before hitting the shutter button, then the app stitched all the photos together. After that was solutions that had a grid area that a person took photos to fill in for the app to merge. Most apps now use a graphic that two parts at the edge of the view finder which come together for the next photo to be taken. Cycloramic offers an simple, yet effective graphic to show when the next photo is being taken. The app doesn’t require alignment, it takes care of that for you. Unlike most other solutions is the ability to go back the reverse direction mid action if moving too fast for Cycloramic to have gotten a clean photo. The ability to move up/down slightly also gives more height to the resulting images too.

00 Cycloramic iPhone

If you have an iPhone 5 and a smooth/flat surface… Cycloramic will do all the work for you. A feature that put the app into everyone’s conversation when it was first introduced is how the app will vibrate the iPhone 5 to cause it to turn. Basically, place your iPhone 5 on it’s bottom edge, tap the button to take a photo, Cycloramic spins the iPhone and snaps photos as it goes. No add on hardware is required!

In the most recent update is a new feature to have the panoramic photo converted to a movie. Sometimes you want to share a photo that people can move around the 360 photo. Generally though, the message of the environment is best delivered via a controlled view which a movie does. Cycloramic 2.1 does the stitching and conversion to a movie to export all in one app.

Canon SELPHY CP900 Wireless Printer and an iPhone is my modern Polaroid

Why did we love our Polaroid cameras? It was the experience and the instant gratification of seeing the photo in a time that everyone else had to go to the local shop to get their film developed and printed. The ability to share a printed version of a photo just taken. While the sharing of a print with others quickly following the taking of the photo, the Polaroid experience has the limitation of there being only one copy of the photo… and you just gave it away!!

Trying to mimic some of the fun, I have been playing with a variety of printers. There are a lot of ink printers available on the market. Many are very inexpensive, until it comes time to buy the ink cartridges. Most printers also use a single cartridge for all colors (Black gets it’s own cartridge). This means that you have to buy a cartridge if any of the colors gets used completely. This drives up the ‘per print’ cost when partially used cartridges are getting thrown away. Also, printers are generally for printing a 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper so they are much larger than needed for a small photo print.

Over the recent holidays, a new smaller square printer appeared all of the gadget stores. It came with a 30 pin connector on top so a person can print their iPhone stored photos. After playing with one at a store, I could see the value, except I have no interest is having to dock my iPhone to the printer. It’s a wireless world!

Enter, the Canon SELPHY CP900. A wireless printer that prints to 4 x 6 paper that lasts for 100 years… and the prints are water resistant too! Printing with a iOS or Android device requires the use of a free Canon app which does have some limitations but gets the job done in under a minute.

01 CP900 for iPhone

The CP900 is pretty small, just 7″ x 5″ x 2.7″. Along with connecting to wireless network, there is a SD card slot and a USB plug. Power is provided by an included wall plug, or an upgrade external battery power supply. A small pop up LCD screen allows for managing of printing from the SD card, the USB is handy for mobile or desktop connections. I’m only using via the wireless capability.

02 CP900 for iPhone

The printer has some uniqueness in it’s paper and ‘ink’. The paper comes from Canon where the front and back edges are removable via perforated lines. The extra paper is for the printer to pull the paper in. The reason for there being the extra on both ends is because of the printing method Canon has chosen to use. The ‘ink’ is a canister of ‘film’. The CP900 pulls in the paper from the front and pushes out the back. The print paper is pulled towards the front, where a single color (starts with Yellow) is applied to the paper. The page is returned automatically to the back of the printer then fed to the front to have another color applied, happening 4 times, all in about 40 seconds. Since the multi color film in the cartridge has to advance at a rate to handle each pass of the paper, this means there is an exact amount of the film to print each page. The card paper comes with ‘Canon’ printed on the back or a specialized version that has been printed to use as a postcard. A bulk pack has three color film cartridges and 108 4×6 papers for less than $30… which means there is a cost of 28 cents per print, no more, no less.

03 CP900 for iPhone

So, I am mobile with my iPhone, and I can print quickly to share with those that like paper photo prints. Just for fun, there is always apps like ‘Instant’ that lets me frame my print to look just like a Polaroid snapshot.

04 CP900 for iPhone

Echograph – A new view of creating animated GIFs on the iPhone

Animated GIFs… I can take em or leave em. When I head the term, I think of the little cute icons on Web pages years ago that where just fluff on the page. More recently, there has been a few services that are encouraging more creative thinking around a few images put together into a story. If the images are thought through a bit, it can be a fun way of sharing a moment. There are two methods that the popular services are using, either it’s a video shot at a very slow speed or a person shoots a series of photos that the app stitches together.

Now, there is Echograph, offering a third way of showing motion in an animated GIF. The movement is set to a particular area of a photo so only the parts needing to move to tell the story are moving, the rest of the image is frozen. This removes a lot of the jerky look found on most multi image GIFs.

The Echograph app is simple to use, but actually pretty powerful. This is a Universal app, so the fun doesn’t have to be limited to the iPhone, editing on the larger iPad screen may have ultimately better results if your looking for maximum impact.

Shoot or import a video. Cut it down to a maximum of 5 seconds long via a slider along the bottom of the screen. Choose the area you want to allow movement to happen by painting over it with your finger or stylus (a person in the shot, a flowing river, etc…), then share or export in low or high resolution. Yup, it’s that easy! Admittedly, this is not the solution for all animated GIF, it is more for those images where only want a particular part to move. Some animated GIFs need the full screen to be changing for the message, but for those shots that you want a still photo and a part of it alive, Echograph has you covered.

PhotoJojo is going to school you on better iPhone Photography

This just in… PhotoJojo wants to go beyond cool iPhone photography gadgets and fun books. Now, they are offering their own ‘University’ on ‘Phoneography 101‘.

For $5 (introductory price), you will receive two emails a week for four weeks covering; Camera Basics, Composition, Lighting, Experimental, Creative Effects, Tools, Editing and Sharing. The emails are reported to be ‘bite-sized’ and formatted to view on the iPhone screen. Each lesson taking minutes instead of hours. While there is no homework or surprise quizzes, each lesson does end with a challenge to strength your photography skills. All taught by Professor Pancake, Professor PJ and a Basket of Kittens… yea, they have s sense of humor over at PhotoJojo.

What do I think? Well, I have yet to receive my first lesson but below are some screen shots they offer on the site. It looks interesting and may prove to be a great gift for the new iPhone (no Android version available!!) owner that found they now have a camera everywhere they go.

01 PhotoJojo University

02 PhotoJojo University

03 PhotoJojo University

Share weather information on photos for where they were taken

Last week I found an app that provided a easy method of inserting location text onto photos. It was a feature I saw a few folks using on Instagram and thought it must be an app rather than everyone getting creative adding text. This week, there seems to be a lot of folks posting pictures showing weather information. The weather numbers don’t always match what I may have assumed looking at the photo. A nice sunny photo showing below freezing numbers reminds me of a few days in Colorado.

An app, Instaweather Pro offers similar features to the location app I previously covered. You can take a photo with the app and add the weather information for where the photo was taken. There are a variety of templates to choose from, just swipe across the screen to choose the layout and quantity of information. The period of time can be today, the next few days or the whole week. While temperature is the info I have seen used most often, Instaweather Pro can also overlay text for air pressure, rain, wind strength and direction.

01 Instaweather pro

02 Instaweather Pro