In the process of putting this blog back together using a new WordPress template I wanted to post some more image-heavy stuff to try out the new look, so what better excuse to pop on my shamefully underused 50mm f/1.8 Nikon lens and have a wander around my place of work. Much easier than trekking out somewhere exotic in London in the middle of the coldest winter in 30 years!
All these shots were made using the D700’s B&W mode, something I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole on other cameras but which works quite well on the D700 due to the options available for tweaking the tonality and the contrast. I personally prefer my B&W shots a little bit punchier than I was able to muster using those options so some of these have had their shadow and highlight levels tweaked in CS4, but otherwise as shot.
A few weeks back I mentioned that the website for 1 Day had gone live, a movie I did some stills for in 2008. It opens next week and today I arrived at work to discover a bunch of my photos from it on page 3 of The Independent. It turns out the film, which is set in Birmingham and centres on street gang warfare punctuated by rap musical numbers, is being turned down by certain chain cinemas in the city after a West Midlands police officer informally suggested to the manager of the Birmingham Odeon that he shouldn’t show it. The manager then spoke to other cinemas who also agreed not to show it, although there are several others that will.
Anyway, despite the negative connotations of the story itself, it was pretty cool to see several of my shots in print in such a high profile article. On the way home I picked up the latest Empire and found they’d reviewed the film and in so doing had given me my first ever publicity still in print within their covers, which I’m pretty stoked about. I’ve had shots in plenty of listings pages and some industry magazines, which is very satisfying, but Empire is something else so I’m just riding on that little cloud at the moment!
So there’s now millions of iPhones in the wild and a lot of people are taking photos with them. According to stats that I checked just moments ago there’s over 14 million iPhone photos and over 113,000 iPhone 3GS photos on Flickr. I guess they don’t differentiate between the original iPhone and the 3G as the camera didn’t change, but the 3GS gets its own category since the sensor was upgraded. Interestingly I took a screengrab of the same statistics on Tuesday the 29th of September (almost a week ago) and there were 76,000 3GS images, so that’s a 50% increase in 6 days, which seems odd assuming Flickr’s stat machine isn’t on the blink.
Obviously there’s nothing new in taking photos on a phone and other phones have many millions of photos on Flickr, but my point is that the relatively poor technical spec of the iPhone camera doesn’t make it any less popular amongst its users.
The wealth of photography apps on the Store offer a huge variety of options to the experience of taking a photo. There’s a lot of repetition though, and plenty of trash, so I’ve only ever gone for apps that were either considered the best or which appealed in some other way, such as the interface. Whatever you can think of, by this point there is almost certainly “an app for that” (grr). I’ve just had a clear-out and the core bunch that will never leave are CameraBag, QuadCamera, ToyCamera and Tiltshift Generator. I’ll look at those four today, and they’re really fantastic if you’ve not heard of them.
Three others I use a lot, not covered in this post but perhaps later, are Pano, Polarize and Snapbox. Pano and Polarize are another two keepers and I heard that the latter is about to get a big update which will hopefully fix some long-standing issues with the once-dormant app. Snapbox is one I toy with now and again but is by the same developer as Polarise so worth a mention alongside it.
I also hang on to Photogene and Best Camera. I find these apps perfectly adequate but if it wasn’t for a couple of particularly cool or useful things they did I wouldn’t miss them if I deleted them. Still, worth a look!
Finally I also have a couple of photo-related apps, Tumblr and Pixelpipe, that don’t actually process shots but are my go-to guys for uploading to blogs or Flickr, as well as another app called DropBox that I’ve been using a lot of recently for syncing iPhone photos (amongst other things) across my devices.
So I’m going to go through each one and give it a mini-review with as many screenshots as possible to let you make an informed decision about going on an App Store spending spree.
I think this was possibly the first camera app I got on my iPhone, and it’s still easily my most used, I absolutely love it. It has 10 filters built in although two of them are a bit crap really, as you’ll see below. You load a photo by selecting it from your library or taking a new one within the app, then choose a filter to apply by swiping left or right through them. It shows you the effect and when you’re happy you save the image. There’s also a drop down menu for going directly to a filter.
Guess which two filters I’ve removed from the ‘swipe’ list? Yep, Infrared and Fisheye. Still, valiant attempt to diversify but I think they’re a bit naff. The 1964 option is a little harsh as well, creating blown highlights and huge areas of pure black, but it’s worth keeping active as it does suit some photos.
Also, I’ve disabled the ‘crop’ feature in the settings, but when it’s active it crops the Helga, Lomo and Instant filters square, crops 1974 almost square, and Cinema into a narrow 16:9 format which really doesn’t work well on vertical images. There’s also a border option and you can vary the output size of the saved images if your iPhone is struggling – like most camera apps it gobbles up memory and so like most camera apps has garnered its fair share of negative reviews on the App Store for regularly crashing if it’s been a while since you last rebooted the phone. If that happens restarting is generally necessary but the I’d have thought the iPhone 3GS would run it well – can anyone confirm that?
If you’re feeling especially creative you can reopen a saved image in order to apply another filter on top. This mechanic of multiple filters has since been done better in a few other apps which allow them to be applied on top of each other before saving, but like a classic movie this app never seems to get old and every so often an update drops a new filter in there. There’s even a desktop version now, although the Photoshopper in me is loathe to stoop to an automated processing technique for ‘proper’ photos.
This is just one of several photography apps from Takayuki Fukatsu, who runs a company called Art&Mobile. Apparently his photo apps are regularly amongst the most downloaded iPhone apps in Japan, particularly ToyCamera which I’ll come to next.
QuadCamera basically copies the likes of the Lomo Actionsampler and Oktomat cameras, which take 4 or 8 shots in quick succession and present them in one frame as a sequence. A quick look at the settings page clearly shows the options available, and also gives you a good idea of the presentation style Art&Mobile favour. As you can see it’s very un-Mac-like, which at first alienated me but it actually does the job very well and I’ve come to rather like its distinctive appearance, which also appears in his most recent app Tiltshift Generator, although not in ToyCamera.
In terms of customisation there’s a slider to alter the delay between each shot in your sequence, whether to shoot 4 or 8 shots and whether to lay them out in a row or in a 2×2 or 2×4 arrangement. There’s a selection of filters: Vivid, Bright, Dull, Hi Con, Grayscale and No Effect. If you choose the 1×4 or 1×8 options the app will lay them out vertically for landscape oriented shots, or horizontally for portrait orientation.
There’s a second menu hidden in the Settings app for the iPhone itself, where you can remove the borders or the vignette, or activate a ‘Tap Anywhere’ shutter release, and deactivate the shutter sound.
QuadCamera is unusual in that it automatically saves the result whether you like it or not. In my case this means I easily end up with a dozen different new photos in my camera roll every time I use it because once you start it’s hard to stop and even though I might not actually like any given result it gets saved regardless. It’s extremely hard not to find something interesting in pretty much every shot you get from it, though, especially with all the different filters to try.
There’s also a lot more you can try with it than just the obvious ‘train coming into a station’ type shot. I had dozens of attempts at the magazine shot below before getting it the way I wanted it! The escalator shot went through the Lolo filter in CameraBag a few times to get the glowing orange. It also makes for unusual panoramas.
There’s not a great deal else, if anything, that duplicates QuadCamera – if there is I’d like to have a look at it. If you don’t already have it, you should definitely check out this app and others from the same developer.
It’s another of Takayuki Fukatsu’s apps and I toyed (geddit?) with deleting it quite a few times as it was frustratingly restrictive when it came to customisation. A recent update fixed that though, and so it’s earned a permanent slot on my ‘camera app’ screen.
Vintage GreenVintage WarmVintage Yellow
Low SaturationHigh SaturationToning Sepia
Rich B&WHiCon B&WOriginal scene, no ToyCamera
ToyCamera is designed to mimic the weird colours, blur and vignetting of ‘toy cameras’ such as the plastic Holga and Lomo models. There’s plenty of other apps that offer similar effects as it’s a look that’s very much in vogue, and to that end purists should note that it’s heavily stylised, with extremely strong colour, contrast and B&W toning filters that go way beyond most photos I’ve seen produced by these cameras it’s inspired by. The flipside of this is that in terms of this look, ToyCamera is pretty much rules the roost on the App Store.
Up until recently the app used to apply the filters randomly by default, which was frustrating if the filter it chose didn’t suit the image (they really can be too much sometimes). Now, however, you can choose a specific filter to be used but only before you shoot; you can’t pick an effect to apply to a photo you already have, like you can with CameraBag for example. If you’re into the whole random ‘shoot from the hip’ ethos that the Lomographic people promote then you can activate the random mode and select which effects you’d like it to choose from.
Other settings include the standard image size settings (with a full range of sizes from 320 x 427 up to 1200 x 1600), the option to crop square and/or apply a vignette, and whether or not you’d like to upload to the Big Canvas Photoshare community. I’ve never used this as there’s just too many photo sharing communities out there for me to keep up with, but it’s there if you want it. Ideally a future update of the app would add Twitter and Facebook and all the usual suspects, which is actually something that several other apps could do with sorting out in the same vein as Best Camera has (the best example of a one-touch sharing solution – I’ll cover it in a subsequent post).
Apart from that it’s a fun little app that offers pretty much all the crazy extreme ‘toy camera’ effects you could possibly want.
Yet another photo app from Art&Mobile, designed by Takayuki Fumatsu and Takuma Mori. It’s an example of a function that is covered by other apps in the store (such as Tiltshift – App Store), but to my tastes this is the better example, with a more pleasing effect and the same sleek interface which I liked so much in Quadcamera.
Tiltshift lenses are expensive lenses that allow you to shift the focus around by tilting the lens independently of the camera body, creating bizarre depth of field effects that trick the eye into thinking it’s looking at a miniature model of a life-size scene. It’s possible to fake the effect by applying heavy blur to a photo, leaving a strip or area sharp. Tiltshift Generator gives you this ability, as well as the option to alter the contrast, brightness and saturation, and add a vignette.
Like many other apps, you have the option to shoot a photo from within, or open one from your library. Then you select the area you want to keep sharp (or protect for blurring). In the example above I’ve used the ‘strip’ option but you can also switch to a circular selection. As you can see, there’s a central pair of thick bars, then two lighter outer bars. Inside the thicker bars stays sharp, and between that and the outer bars the blur blends in. Moving the slider adjusts how ‘quickly’ the blend occurs across the photo.
The next tab along covers the saturation, brightness and contrast controls. Finally there’s a vignette slider, and then saving and export options. Export lets you mail it out or post to Twitter.
If there is any room for improvement with Tiltshift Generator, it’s that the contrast and brightness sliders are very sensitive and it’s very easy to make a small precise adjustment and then nudge it when you remove your finger from the screen. The iPhone sensor doesn’t have the greatest dynamic range in the world so it’s all too easy to blow the hell out of the highlights, or create large chunks of sold black in the corners with the vignette – but a little tweaking can usually find a good middle ground. Also, the save size is set to 800×600 but I believe this will change in a future update.
I’ve found you don’t need to limit yourself to making traditional tiltshift photos, and have used the app to blur the corners of photos in a ‘Holga’ style, as well as to create depth of field on my 3G iPhone.
I’m a big fan of vignettes and slightly de-saturated contrasty images, so this app has seen almost as much use as CameraBag since its release. Highly recommended!
That’s all for now but plenty to get your teeth into if you’ve not heard of any. Next time, Pano, Polarize and SnapBox.
If you’re a photographer and you use a Mac, chances are you’ve probably already heard of the vast majority of these, but it’s still a pretty good list so I really ought to link to it before I lose too many readers.
The Ultimate Mac Setup for Photographers is a nice collection of apps that you’re bound yo find handy when it comes to your digital workflow on your Mac. (and I nicked the image on the left from their site – credit where it’s due!)
There’s a couple of things I use that aren’t on there at all, surprisingly. First of all, in ‘Organizing and Editing’ (damn their American spellings!) they’ve tragically forgotten Photo Mechanic which to my mind is by far the best organisational tool for professional photographers. Of course, I’m biased because I don’t use Bridge, Aperture, Lightroom or iPhoto.
I’m not a fan of what iPhoto does to my filing system. I think Aperture does the same thing, I might be wrong. iPhoto’s default system is to take your photos off your memory card and store them where it wants to see them, in a folder within a folder within a folder within iPhoto’s own folder in your Pictures folder. Then if you make edits to the image it stores another copy and keeps the original untouched (good move). I don’t like this because it ties me into using iPhoto exclusively so that at least all my photos are in one place – but that’s iPhoto’s place, and if I want to use other apps, it becomes messy. Which one do I edit? Where do I save it?
And what if I have other shoots in different places but I want to start using them in iPhoto? It copies them from where they are to it’s own folder again, creating more duplicates. No, I vastly prefer to have complete control over my photos. I use iPhoto only for the occasional calendar or photobook from Apple, or to create albums of images to put on my iPhone. That’s it. I realise I can now set iPhoto to not move/copy photos to it’s own location, but that’s by the by as it’s simply a consumer tool – it might be great for you, but it’s not for me.
Photo Mechanic, which I use, doesn’t have any editing capabilities, focussing just on organisation and tagging. I ingest a whole shoot into my computer from a card using the app – it adds my IPTC info to each photo as it arrives. Then I can tag using stars (1-5) or colours; view or edit EXIF and IPTC metadata; preview full screen; move photos around the computer; batch rename; all the usual organisational stuff. It can show me previews of my RAW files almost instantly, rendering a preview JPG from the RAW data without any latent interpretation of the data by the app – the settings I shot at are what it shows me so I can make a judgement call. I can also export images to a web-gallery automatically, with a choice of several different packages – I use the SimpleViewer package almost exclusively as it’s so simple and classic. Finally, the colour or rating tags I apply can be set to be recognised by Nikon Capture NX2, my RAW developer of choice.
Which is the second big omission in my eyes. They list Lightroom, Capture One Pro and Aperture, but no Capture NX2. I know Lightroom, Capture and Aperture are the big boys with the big marketing bucks, but Capture NX2 is the only software that can do proper justice to a Nikon RAW file, in my opinion. It’s the only RAW converter I’ve used where the image I saw on the LCD is exactly what I get on the screen when I open the RAW file up. Other converters apply their own baseline values to the RAW files which necessitates setting up your own defaults that match what you thought you were shooting at the time. NX2 also gives you all the controls you’re used to on your Nikon camera, such as the Picture Control and Active D-Lighting settings. It’s also up to a useable speed on my aluminium iMac (the first of the new line of iMacs that came out a couple of years ago).
Other than that, it’s a great list with a lot of great apps in there. Have a look and see if there’s something you’re missing out on.
Yesterday I mentioned an iPhone app called Camerabag that applies filters to iPhone photos. Today I happened across a free app for Macs and PCs called Poladroid.
You drag an image from your computer onto the application (which is represented by a lovely icon of a Polaroid camera) and it makes that whizz and whirr sound and produces a Polaroid-styled JPG which actually has to develop. Once finished it saves in a location of your choice (which you can set up in Preferences). There’s even a setting for randomly grittying up the image, which sometimes results in a lovely smudgy thumbprint somewhere (see the photo of the grass). As with many photography apps these days, there’s a Flickr group of users as well.
The effect and the realistic texture of the frame is better than the effect used in Camerabag, but as it’s a desktop app you can use it on pictures from your ‘better’ cameras which makes up for the lack of spontaneity an iPhone app engenders. However, the makers of Poladroid have announced they’re working on an iPhone version too, which could be a lot of fun. 🙂
A few weeks back I mentioned that the website for 1 Day had gone live, a movie I did some stills for in 2008. It opens next week and today I arrived at work to discover a bunch of my photos from it on page 3 of The Independent. It turns out the film, which is set in Birmingham and centres on street gang warfare punctuated by rap musical numbers, is being turned down by certain chain cinemas in the city after a West Midlands police officer informally suggested to the manager of the Birmingham Odeon that he shouldn’t show it. The manager then spoke to other cinemas who also agreed not to show it, although there are several others that will.
The wealth of photography apps on the Store offer a huge variety of options to the experience of taking a photo. There’s a lot of repetition though, and plenty of trash, so I’ve only ever gone for apps that were either considered the best or which appealed in some other way, such as the interface. Whatever you can think of, by this point there is almost certainly “an app for that” (grr). I’ve just had a clear-out and the core bunch that will never leave are CameraBag, QuadCamera, ToyCamera and Tiltshift Generator. I’ll look at those four today, and they’re really fantastic if you’ve not heard of them.
Also, I’ve disabled the ‘crop’ feature in the settings, but when it’s active it crops the Helga, Lomo and Instant filters square, crops 1974 almost square, and Cinema into a narrow 16:9 format which really doesn’t work well on vertical images. There’s also a border option and you can vary the output size of the saved images if your iPhone is struggling – like most camera apps it gobbles up memory and so like most camera apps has garnered its fair share of negative reviews on the App Store for regularly crashing if it’s been a while since you last rebooted the phone. If that happens restarting is generally necessary but the I’d have thought the iPhone 3GS would run it well – can anyone confirm that?
In terms of customisation there’s a slider to alter the delay between each shot in your sequence, whether to shoot 4 or 8 shots and whether to lay them out in a row or in a 2×2 or 2×4 arrangement. There’s a selection of filters: Vivid, Bright, Dull, Hi Con, Grayscale and No Effect. If you choose the 1×4 or 1×8 options the app will lay them out vertically for landscape oriented shots, or horizontally for portrait orientation.
Up until recently the app used to apply the filters randomly by default, which was frustrating if the filter it chose didn’t suit the image (they really can be too much sometimes). Now, however, you can choose a specific filter to be used but only before you shoot; you can’t pick an effect to apply to a photo you already have, like you can with CameraBag for example. If you’re into the whole random ‘shoot from the hip’ ethos that the Lomographic people promote then you can activate the random mode and select which effects you’d like it to choose from. 
If you’re a photographer and you use a Mac, chances are you’ve probably already heard of the vast majority of these, but it’s still a pretty good list so I really ought to link to it before I lose too many readers.
