Tag Archives: iPhone Photography

Scout Camera for the iPhone where taking the photo is the fun

Photography with the iPhone for most people is about editing the photo afterwards. Take photos, then try to make them fit in a Instagram square or experiment with filters to enhance the theme. There are a couple camera apps I have covered before that let you see how the photo will appear with a filter added prior to taking the picture. Usually, these apps have a ton of features that need to be set, taking away from the fun of snapping a quick shot.

The folks that developed Scout Camera seem to have the fun of photography in mind, knowing that a iPhone taken photo will need to fit into a world outside of the iPhone. It is easier to know what things will fit together later when limits are thought of when snapping the actual photo.

Launching the app offers a the ability to start shooting right away. Tap the screen to adjust the camera exposure reference point. Scout Camera places all of the feature ‘on/off’ options along the bottom: apps photo storage, flash control, shutter, filters and cropped view.

Second from the right in the lower area is the Filters built into Scout Camera. Sweep left/right to view the option, tapping one will change the camera viewer to show how the picture will appear if taken. A quick tool for taking retro or black and white photos.

Choosing the ‘crop’ button on the lower right corner will frame the photo being taken within the limits of the crop. 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 and 1:1 are supported. No concerns later when a crop may cut off part of the picture’s story. Scout Camera outputs in full resolution, for example the 1:1 is 2448 x 2448. After the photo is taken, it is saved to the app’s internal viewer with location and notes included. Export to the iPhone photo library, Open With… for editing in other apps, Instagram, email, Facebook and Twitter are all options.

iPhone photography Rock The Vote photo contest

The Hipstamatic iPhone camera app folks want you to get out and VOTE. So, to bring the message home, they have a new photo contest: Theme:: We Will. Now through Nov 7th, turn in your photos for a chance to win…

Top voted submission: Hipstamatic Grab Pak filled with all sorts of goodies.

Featured Submission: Selecting the most imprssive shots for a piece in the November issue of SNAPMagazine.

In support of the contest is a Free Film Pak!

Access to the film is in the usual spot within the iPhone Hipstamatic cart area, just go there and download at no charge.

ROCK THE VOTE FREEPAK INCLUDES::
RtV: this border looks like you grabbed a marker off the table at a local election rally to make a perfect DIY-looking frame for your photos

RtV SHOUT: this film has the same rad DIY feel of the first, and then cranks up the volume. Rock the Vote phrases are splashed across your image, reminding you of the power you hold as a voter in every election.

Here is a stream of the Hipstamatic Rock The Vote submissions:

iPhone and Racing Fans! Special edition magazine, Le Mans in Instagram

If your reading this, you most likely take photos with your iPhone. You may even share your photos with friends on Instagram.

Are you a auto racing fan? Know about the 24 hours of Le Mans? Over 24 hours, a lot can happen on and off the race track. Especially in the case of this particular race since there is a wide variety of cars from the top automotive brands around the world. Names you know like Audi, Peugeot, Nissan, Porsche, Mazda and Ferrari. Each trying to solve the problem of being in the lead at the end of the 24 hours. There are many unique things to see everywhere. Like many major events, capturing the atmosphere in photographs to share can be difficult.

L’endurance Magazine took the challenge on and have released a special electronic issue of photographs from the 2012 Le Mans event, all shot using an iPhone and the Instagram app. It is very impressive! Download your free copy directly from their site: lendurance.co.uk

Photographs by: Dan Bathie

Adding light to the dark areas of iPhone Photos… without carrying a huge flash!

I didn’t want to lead off the post with a headline saying ‘FREE’ again, but this iPhone Photo enhancement uses the ACDSee Camera Flash app, which is FREE TODAY ONLY. The app is Universal so it will help with those quick edits on your iPad too.

Similar to the Clarify effect and other light balancing enhancements in popular iPhone Photo apps, ACDSee Camera Flash is a ‘one button’ app that lightens the dark areas of photos without a lot of your effort. This works very well for pictures taken of people in front of buildings where the building is bright and you lost the features of the person in darkness. After the app does it’s work, there is a slider to tone down the effect a bit if the brighter areas of the original photo gets lost. Of course, ACDSee Camera works better with some photos than others. A photo I took of a boat landing worked very well as the dock and water around it came alive to match the shore in the background that used to be the only part visible. Clouds do loose their detail in most situation though… ‘success’ with ACDSee Camera Flash really depends on what your hoping the end result is.

Saving the photo out of ACDSee Camera Flash can be Small, Medium and Large… where large is the full size of the original photo. Below is the before after, where the after (lower) is left with the default rather than using the slider to tune a bit.

Big updated to one of my favorites iPhone Photography apps – Camera+ goes 3.0

Camera+ gets used a lot. That is to say, I have a large selection of iPhone Photo apps I use every day. They go from very specialized to very generalized. There are a couple that are ‘do it all’ apps that I can shoot with, as well do my final edits in. Camera+ is one of those apps that I shoot with very little but turn to when I do edits and enhancements. It isn’t like SnapSeed for tiny spot changes, rather for editing the full photo.

With this update, I will be using Camera+ for more of the actual photography too.

The list of updates to Camera+ is long, thus it is now version 3.0 (on sale right now!). To start, the ability to have focus and exposure as separate spots is now supported. What is nice is the way it was implemented. When frame up a shot, you may tap the screen to choose the focus area like normal. In other apps, you have to choose if you want to do a focus spot or a focus/exposure difference. Notice the small ‘+’ on the focus box, just tap that if you want the split.

Camera+ doesn’t require you decide up front through a setting if you want to do focus or focus/exposure, you decide on the fly.

The filter selection continues to be a quality area of Camera+. With three screens of 9 filters in each area, there is also an additional specialized 9 for a 99 cent in-app upgrade. The best known of the enhancements offered by Camera+ is the ‘Clarify’ which received an upgrade in this update too. Below is a shot that was cropped, clarified, and filtered within Camera+… whole process took less than a minute including saving to the iPhone photo library.

Knowing that not all people work the same, Camera+ lets you: take a single picture and edit it right away, take multiple pictures to edit later and import one/many photos from the iPhone’s photo library to edit.

Along with the above, the folks that created Camera+ have opened an API to other app developers that may want to use the photo editing powers they provide. Titles like WordPress, Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Foodspotting, and Twittelator Neue apps.

The sharing speed has improved too… done via email, attach directly to a ‘message’ (cool now that Messenger works on the Mac too), through social services like Facebook and Twitter, as well now the creation of Web Links is supported.

CameraSharp – it’s about taking the photo with your iPhone and not about filters – Today’s Free App

Getting back to actually taking the photos with your iPhone. Forget filters and frames and highlights and even cleanup. CameraSharp takes me back to the actual action of taking the photo and not the clean up. The (current free) app starts off by making it easy to do a focus and exposure area split. Instead of a single area that has to be dragged about, CameraSharp focuses where you tap with one finger and set’s the photos’ exposure where you tap with two fingers.

On the screen is quick access to a zoom slider and a nice level indicator too.

There is also a variety of photo taking helpers to use while taking your pictures available through the menu next to the shutter button. Each of the CameraSharp options have additional tuning like the Continuous offers numbers of shots and interval between the pictures in seconds.

The CameraSharp Settings area lets you turn on/off what you see while your taking your photographs.

New Stop Motion iPhone app from Studio Neat, creators of the Glif

Remember the Glif? Have you ever heard of the Glif? It is a tripod mount for the iPhone that started life as a Kickstarter social funded project by a couple guys that make up Studio Neat. The design of the Glif is simple… silly simple, but works great.

Generally there are two things you are doing when having your iPhone mounted to a tripod, both involve not moving the iPhone while taking a lot or long exposures. So, night/movement shots and stop animation shots. Staying with the ‘keep it simple’, Studio Neat has introduced their own Stop Motion app – Frames.

The use of the app doesn’t require you own a Glif, it just makes the process easier since you not worried about moving the iPhone between shots.

Frames offers a self explanatory interface where you snap photos (720p HD) to make up your animation. Focus/exposure can be locked, the speed of playback can be adjusted, and images can be added in between previously taken images if you need a change in detail or changed your story idea. The finished result is saved to your iPhone’s (and iPod Touch) photo library. Yup, not a ton of features in Frames for the pro but a killer app for all of us ‘would be’ stop motion movie lovers that want a inexpensive way of jumping in. Recordings don’t just have to be flip card like animations, imagine recording a sunrise or sunset that you can now share with others.

Taking photos faster with the iPhone and iPad2 – Fast Camera Free Today Only!

“Taking photos faster with the iPhone” isn’t a hot tip on how to focus faster or how to tap into a secret power of the iPhone camera. Instead, it’s a camera app for the iPhone that I see is free for the day.

How Fast Camera accomplishes quicker photo taking is by starting to take pictures as soon as the app launches. Tap the app’s icon in the launcher and it starts taking pictures. Tap the stop button when you want the camera stop… pretty simple.

After you have Fast Camera stopped, you can see the number of photos shot in the lower right corner. Tap the ‘Review’ button to see all the images. The bottom of the page offers your next actions. You go return to shooting images into the same set with the ‘Resume’ button… choosing the ‘Done’ button will give you the option to delete the current photos and return to the camera.

Fast Camera’s default camera setting is VGA, but if you have a iPhone4s, you can choose 8 megapixel. The ‘Delay Between Pics’ is adjustable from None, 1/10 second, 1/5 second, 1/4 second, 1/3 seconds, 1/2 seconds, 1 second, 2 seconds and 5 seconds. Set to ‘none’, Fast Camera will shoot 800 pictures in 1 minute!!

iPhone Obsessed – the iPhone photography book I wanted to write!

The concept was simple, but to pull it off meant a lot of work. I set about taking photos with my iPhone and editing them with a variety of iPhone photo editing apps. I then showed the original and the final options with effects applied. It has been a lot of fun over the last year, and it has been a serious lot of work for a year.

Over the holidays, I found and purchased “iPhone Obsessed“. A book that shows finished images and the app/settings it took to get the image. The author claims it took them a year of hard work to take the photos and work through the best solution to get the effect they were looking for. Having lived a similar year, I can say I believe them. The book is a very nice item to grab (found it on Amazon here) to save yourself many hours to playing around. It is still best to experiment to learn what you can do and equally what doesn’t work. But iPhone Obsessed takes a lot of guess work out of getting to the finished result you may be looking for. It’s a great way of ‘seeing’ ideas around what is possible when you frame up a shot too.

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