iPhonotography
I have an iPhone, and I have Flickr. The iPhone has a pretty dang good camera (in the phone camera world), and when coupled with a few extra apps to help with the processing and color correction, you can actually end up with some pretty interesting shots. It has forced me to start looking more meticulously at my surroundings, always keeping in mind that there could be something worth capturing. In the past I have used the excuse of lugging around my mediocre camera equipment as being too much of a hassle to be worth the shots I was able to capture with it.
However, now that I have my iPhone with me at all times, I really have no excuse to keep my eyes peeled for such photographic opportunities. It’s made me more aware of my surroundings, forced me to look for more creative angles, and has kept my mind-gears spinning even when I think it’s just sitting there idle. I plan to take at least one ‘iPhonotograph’ (I made this term up, because I’m a designer and I can do that) per day. I’m going to see how long I can keep it up. I have found a few apps to be really helpful in the processing of photos, which now I shall explain.
I have been using Camera Genius as my primary photo taking tool. It is, in my opinion, superior to the iPhone’s built in camera thanks to its “Thirds Rulers”, timer, picture stabilizer (helpful with dark or night shots), big button (full screen button for when your trying to take pictures with you in it), and in rare cases the zoom function can be handy.
For color correction, Mill Colour has some amazing features, and also some pretty great preset effects that prove to be a great place to start from in the editing process. The Mill Colour name has been seasoned with excellence over the years thanks to their stellar color correction techniques for photography and cinema.
CameraBag is another app that I have grown to love. Though it doesn’t have the flexibility of working outside of their presets, they too are a great starting place for some color correction options. There are options within the app to toggle whether or not you want the filter to add an authentic border to your photos that would match the development style/cropping of the particular filter preset.
For editing, I have had great success with PhotoForge. Some editing apps can only do a few things, some can seemingly do too much without keeping the interface understandable for the simple edits like cropping and rotation. Within the app you can actually do some pretty great things with color as well with the built-in curves, levels, contrast, and exposure adjustment features. It has been called “Photoshop for the iPhone”, and while that may be a bit of an exaggeration, it really does do a great job.
And lastly, of course, Flickr. This app didn’t exist for a long time, but it really has made the process of browsing and uploading to Flickr a breeze. You’d have to be a brain damaged moron to not be able to figure out their intuitive interface, and the functionality is effective for your simple tasks of flickr, but somewhat limited in comparison to the website itself. However, for uploading on the go, it’s a more than adequate setup.
That’s my process of photo capture and editing on the iPhone, and here are just a few examples of what will hopefully be a good size collection of photos taken.
