Posts Tagged ‘apps’
The iPhone as a creative tool
My recent infatuation with the iPhone lives on. Recently i’ve been rethinking my approach to photography and digging deeper at the roots of the passion i have for it. Part of it is the gear, i’m obsessed with and addicted to anything shiny and new. The other part is the feeling i get when i see an image that moves me.
I’ve never really complained much about carrying a large photo bag all day in fact i like the look and feel of a heavy camera body. But gear isn’t everything. The iPhone is by no means a replacement for my camera gear. However it provides a great way to be creative on the go without having to lug my photo backpack with me. It also limits me, in terms of flash and the lenses i can use. I find this simplicity quite relaxing and inspiring and it makes me look for other ways to make an image great. Angles, composition and mood become more important and the lack of zoom or flash although technically a restriction does not stifle  creativity. This is generally true for any type of photographic gear. It’s also a pretty good tool for macro photography, and that’s something i haven’t done much of using dslrs.
What i mean to say is that a great picture doesn’t necessarily need to come form a dslr, it can come from pretty much anything. The more portable that camera is the more you’re gonna shoot with it. Chances of getting a “once in a lifetime” shot increase because you have a camera on you at all times. The most inspiring images almost always tend to be the ones that capture the energy of the moment, and that’s hard to do if you’re gonna need time to set up a shot.
The editing apps are getting more and more powerful too. The apps i own right now can pretty much do everything i need but image compositing and multiple exposure HDR, and i’m pretty sure that that will be coming out in one way or another. Panorama stitching works flawlessly with AutoStitch. While a lot of camera phones can stitch images, this app allows you to take a matrix of images in any order and much like PS it’ll figure out what goes where and blend it together. Photogene, Photo fx and Best Camera are the apps i use for color correction/enhancements and the results are pretty great there as well. Although ColorSplash has masking capabilities i really miss this in all the other editing apps, it would be great if before applying a filter you could just paint a mask over the area the filter is to be applied to. And time-lapse, yeah there’s an app for that too. It doesn’t put the images together into movies but it’s pretty versatile with how many images and at what intervals it can shoot.
All this lead to me starting a new page titled “iPhone art” where i’ll post shots i take and edit on the iPhone. Check it out, see what you think, and be inspired to play.
