Tag Archives: editing images

Using the iPhone to stumble upon interesting Photography articles

I follow a variety of photography twitter accounts and everyday hit a handful of blogs regularly on the subject. Some sites post content multiple times a day that is light and on the general subject of photography. Others, post less often with more specialized content.

Some of the best articles don’t come from the usual places or the expected sources. It is nearly impossible to follow everyone and watch what they are saying. A method I use to keep up on interesting stories without having to sift through every post from people to find their mention of a great article between their posts about what they had for lunch is StumbleUpon. Great site and even a handier free iPhone app.

StumbleUpon works via people finding interesting articles, then sharing to individual categories. This way, you only get referred to articles that you will want to look through. There are iPhone news apps that are great at giving you news with regular scheduled information, some are very nice, but all depend on the usual providers. Since StumbleUpon provides links narrowed to your specific interest, and anyone can suggest links, you end up reading people’s ideas and techniques outside of the main stream agency content.

Launching that free app for the first time, you can see what others are saying are popular areas of interests. You can choose one or many from this area, though they are at a high level.

Using the StumbleUpon’s Categories button along the bottom, you can see all of the areas of interesting, then drill down to particulars so you can get more or less specific content.

After you have your interested ID’d, SumbleUpon will show you your selected area to choose from. No lists of links or people to follow, just a button to go to a article on the subject your interested in.

Choosing of the buttons will take you to an article that someone has linked to on that subject. The service is called ‘StumbleUpon’ because you don’t know anything about the actual article till you get there. If you like what you read, give it a rating thumbs up or down if it isn’t worth anyone’s time reading. The article can be viewed in mobile Safari, shared via email and Twitter too. Rather than going back to the ‘Interests’ page, just tap the upper right corner StumbleUpon button to go to the next article.

HalfTone for the iPhone updated with Dropbox, Photo Stamps and Send To Camera+

As a reminder, HalfTone is the iPhone app that lets you convert your photos to newsprint dots. You can adjust the quantity and quality of those dots, add caption boxes like cartoons have and change the background ‘papers’. At first glance, my thought had been it was an app that has very limited uses, but places to share the photos keeps coming up.

The update has a few items that jump right out as ‘much needed’. The first is the addition to the stamps area, where you can choose an image to use to paste onto your HalfTone converted image. The image stamp can be rotated and resized.

Another item is sending the photos your working on within HalfTone directly out to Camera+. The feature has been available before to send photos directly to other enhancement apps rather than saving to the photo library then importing it to another app. The addition of Camera+ to HalfTone’s Send To options lowers the quantity of steps and number of photos half done on my iPhone.

The full list of HalfTone updates includes sending photos directly to DropBox too: