iPhone photography

I'm pleasantly surprised at the quality of pictures I can get out of the iPhone, both the older model and the new 3GS. It takes a bit of care and thought when making the shots to get decent results and all the usual things about composition and light certainly play a part, too. You do need to play to the strengths of the camera, composing with simple elements, large in the frame and realise you are composing for such a small scene helps. This isn't the best camera in the world to shoot detailed landscapes, but if you treat it well you can get good results. Get close, simplify, simplify.

I use a couple of apps on the phone to process the images. There has been a lot of hype around 'best camera' but I wouldn't honestly recommend it. The filters it provides are all very heavy-handed and don't provide enough finesse to get decent results. At least I haven't been able to do anything other than over saturate or blow out details with it. Fun for about 5 minutes but not worth the money. It has turned into a facebook upload client for me (it doesn't do flickr easily). Certainly has potential but needs work to be really useful.

My favourite two photo processing apps on the iPhone are Mill Colour (free!) and TiltShiftGen (99c). I use Mill Colour for the initial grading of the photos, then TiltShiftGen to provide controllable blur and vignetting. That isn't really the main goal of that application (it lets you do the somewhat cheesy fake miniaturization technique that mimics the cheesy real miniaturization effect people do with tilt shift lenses - fun once.) However, it does provide very flexible blur and vignette controls and is useful if you want to give a krappy kamera feel to your iphone pictures. That's been something I've been experimenting with, with this camera, and I like the results. It is well suited to the simple, bold compositional style the camera tends to require anyway. Playing to the strengths again. I use Mill Colour first to get the general feel right, then finish with TiltShiftGen.

Here's the other camera apps I have on my phone. Pano is good for doing stitched, multiple image shots. Haven't used that much. The various more detailed editors seem good but I don't find much need or use for Photoshop on my phone, other than maybe cropping. Snapture is a great camera app, providing things like touch anywhere to take, zooming, and multiple shot modes. I use that to capture all the images.

Santa Fe

We decided to spend Christmas in Santa Fe, NM. I'd never been there before and Christmas seemed like a good time to go! We had a few inches of snow, just enough to make everything pretty but not too much to spoil walking around. The food was great, the town is lovely, in a slightly faked to stay old-fashioned way and the food was fantastic.

All the pictures here were taken with my iPhone. I'm continually surprised with what I can get out of that with some attention to the format and a couple of cheap applications to do a bit of post processing on the phone. If anyone is interested I can write a bit about what those are and how I'm using them, too. I have more images I took on a better camera, still languishing on the memory card. Meanwhile, I've managed to arrange prints of some of these iPhone pictures, all before even leaving Santa Fe.

forsyth park, savannah, georgia

from my camera phone

Día de los Muertos

I was out last night in south Austin for Laurie's birthday. I turned up a bit too early, before anyone else got there so spent some time strolling around South Congress in the SoCo area. Lots of interesting shops, coffee bars and places to eat. Also plenty of interesting people and things to take pictures of - I think I'll be doing this again with another camera in tow. I found a shop selling crazy sculptures and masks and took the picture above. This is also a first attempt at mobile blogging and using the camera on my phone to try and take reasonably composed pictures. While it isn't exactly a 1DII, it does have a reasonable resolution (1.3Mp) sensor and hasn't done such a terrible job here. I have it with me all the time so I think it can be a good opportunity to continue taking pictures and playing with a camera, even when I don't have the more serious equipment along. At least this way it keeps my eye working and thinking about composition. I've been a bit slack in terms of actually taking pictures or taking my camera out anywhere with me, so this seems like an interesting way back in to more frequent shooting. In this case a polariser might have been wonderful to cut some of that glare from the window - I wonder if they make them for a 5.28mm f/1:2.8 lens ?