Tag Archives: photo share

Presidential Black And White Photography For The iPhone

The Hipstamatic folks keep at it… introducing a new HipstaPak called The District. If you enjoy black and white photography, this will be a nice add to your iPhone camera options. As usual, if your a Oggl social share subscriber, you have access to this film/lens at no extra charge (within Oggl, the Hipstamatic version is still 99 cents when purchased within the app).

One of the example shots for The District lens/film HipstaPak (all are toward US Historical sites, but there is a lot of fun posts on Oggl showing the Pak being put to good use):

As the Pak appears on Oggl

As I promised, here is a shot I took using The District film/lens bundle (defaults to 2448×2448):

Sochi Games Are Over, Do We Still Need The iPhone HipstaPak? Sure!

During the last Winter Olympic Games, the group behind Hipstamatic released a film/lens pak named after the Sochi city. It was interesting but would it live up to staying on the iPhone after the end of the games. As I looked over a few recents shots I took, it would appear it is standing up to time.

If you are a Hipstamatic iPhone camera app user, this is a HipstaPak with a lens and film bundle. Rather than a vintage film look, it produces images that have a feel like new film in a vintage camera (I shoot a lot with new 620 film in my Kodak Hawkeye so I recognized the results pretty quickly).

The photos provided by Hipstamatic show colors are still bright, with a cool light effect.

As usual, here is a couple shots I took with the combo so you can see the Sochi HipstaPak in real life usage:

If your a subscriber to the Oggl photo sharing app/service also provided by the Hipstamatic group. You have access to the lens/film at no additional charge (within Oggl, not the Hipstamatic app). At first, the lens/film bundle on Oggl under the name of Sochi was different than the HipstaPak in the Hipstamatic app. It has been corrected now, but you can see the above shot as it looked via Oggl below.

With SteamZoo Closing, Where Will You Share Your iPhone Pics

There is a lot of options to share your photos with the public. Many started up long before Instagram but have not had the buy-in from the masses. And, if they did get great quantities of visitors, they were unable to turn eyes into money to pay for servers. SteamZoo is a recent but amongst many, photo sharing sites to close up shop. When a service shuts down, where do you go?

Recently, many of the services I have used for storing and/or editing photos online have been bought up and shortly there after shut down. A person builds relationships and workflows around services only to have it taken away. I don’t believe it is an easy decision for a small shop to shut down, it always feels like the funding gods are just around the corner. For big corporate buyouts though, it’s a shame they can hide behind their big visitor counts and push through the few folks they have caused to rethink how they do things. On the subject, while sharing photos is fun and builds friendships from far away places, the biggest impact to my life has been Task Managers shutting down and causing work successes to slow as a whole new system has to be learned.

OK, back to StreamZoo. Since they did give warning, most folks posted up what their ID was on other services so folks could rejoin. Lost is the groups that StreamZoo encouraged for the building of like photos within a area (like Views of San Francisco, Black and White, HDR, etc…).

I thought I would toss up a couple screen shots of the UI so months from now we don’t forget how we interacted with others via this service. Perhaps, a lessons learned for other services to use when thinking about how their visitors like to interact with each other’s snap shots of life.

EyeEm Updated With Tools For More Fun Through Sharing

EyeEm lives in the world of photo sharing, amongst the well publicized Instagram, with it’s own unique thoughts on what sharing is. In the case of EyeEm, photographers can be followed, but mostly people follow tags that photos are arranged by.
If you are a fan about EyeEm or a new users, you may want to look at the first issue of FLTR (covered here:iPhone Photographer Magazine To Read On The iPhone), where there is a nice interview covering the path foreword for the app and supporting service.
The free iPhone EyeEm app was recently updated. If you have an iPad, the UX is customized for the larger screen. In the case of the iPhone, the text on each photo has been resized for easier reading.

I’m happy to see the quick like (Heart in the case of EyeEm) feature. From about any photo view, double tap to let the photographer know you enjoyed their photo. Must quicker than always having to go to the photo’s detail view (above). When someone marks one of your photos with a comment, heart or follows, the number in the upper right corner of the screen changes to Red and shows the quantity of new influences. Tap to view and clear.

Three new filters have been added to EyeEm as well. Below is each of the filters applied to the same photo to see the filter’s impact. Leonie (popular right now as a ‘mission’ tag contest), Eva and Don.

So You Want To Start A Magazine With Your iPhone Photos

For a fun view of creative minds at work, I sometimes visit behance.net . There, anyone can post their creative work for others to see and comment on. It can help a person fine tune their ideas as well possibly lead to work coming from someone looking for the creative person’s talents.

I was searching for vintage work when I came across several Polaroid themed projects. One, a magazine about the history of Polaroid and The Impossible Project linked off of behance.net to a service provider. The magazine/book appears to be a school project so it was never produced, but The Impossible Polaroid Book is a nice online read.

The magazine/book was being hosted on issuu (I didn’t get it till autocorrect tried to replace with ‘issue’). The service hosts small run online magazines as well as online versions of major printed publications. For someone looking to post their hard work, there is a free service of ‘Essential Features’. Beyond that, if site integration, targeted distribution, and other customizations are $29/$39 per month. What a great way to put together a magazine idea, promote, and see if there can be a following that could turn into a for-pay product.

The Essential Features include Detailed stats and analytics, SEO, Timed launch, social share to Facebook/Twitter, Human support, Embed widget, Javascript API, Search API, and up to 500 pages per publication. Viewers use a reader that supports 150 dpi resolution, dock navigation, single/two page layout, and in doc search.

There doesn’t seem to be any limitations on the quantity of publications an account can have and no limits to the number of public views.

The for-pay upgrades on issuu includes promoting the publication to the issuu monthly readers, better stack organization, unique URL, etc…

What will it be? Tips on iPhone photography? Your favorite shots? Special edits you have done to photographs? Issuu appears to be one way to see if anyone shares in your interests.

EyeEm Social Share Updates With More Tags, Captions and Friends

EyeEm iPhone photo sharing service is up to their old tricks… adding more features and helping it’s users find others to view and share with. Kidding aside, the updates to the latest version of EyeEm isn’t about enhancing the actual photos. Instead, the service is looking for more ways people can relate through their photos. The service is one I enjoy visiting to see photos from around the world. Posts are all across the scale with street photography from a small village somewhere few of us have heard of, through to high school lunch snaps. The latest updates will help me find just what I’m interested in viewing, no matter my mood swings between visits.

After you snap a photo with the EyeEm app or import one from your iPhone’s photo library, enhance with the editing tools. Next, you can add your location with the name of the company location your at or city your in. New in this update is a step to add a caption to the photo and tagging friends to the photo.

The original EyeEm had you set your location then add a tag. I noticed that some folks seem to have more than one tag. The trick to add more than one tag had been to post the photo, then ‘edit’ it, adding more tags. Now, by default, EyeEm lets you add up to four tags along with your caption. Just tap the ‘add’ and start typing, a list of tags others have used will appear to choose. Or, add your own so others can start posting to that tag too.

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.

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.