Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Fun With the iPhone Camera


After reading Chase Jarvis' post, 5 Tips for Making Great iPhone Photos," I thought I'd give it a shot. I bought the two apps he suggested, Camera Bag ($2.99) and Pano ($2.99), and so far haven't been disappointed.

Camera Bag gives you a bunch of presets to transform your iPhone into one of several types of historical cameras. This shot here was given the "Lolo" preset (apparently a knock-off of the old Loma toy cameras, though I'm not that familiar with them). I'm also a fan of the "Helga," which tries to make your shots look like they were taken with a Holga camera.

Pano is a very powerful photo stitching app, allowing you to stitch together up to six photos, side-by-side. The rightmost sliver of the photo is laid semi-transparently on the left side to help you line up the next shot. The exposure blending and seam-joining is top-notch. I'll post a shot when I come across something interesting to shoot.

One great thing about being able to shoot and post-process your shots in-camera is that you can then upload them to your Flickr account with such apps as Darkslide, or using Flickr's email upload service.

It's weird when you get excited about degrading the quality of your $300 iPhone photos to look like old camera snapshots, but hey, it's made me interested in using the thing. I'm looking forward to posting more on-the-go shots with my new toy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lomo would be the company that makes the holgas, aswell as other toy cameras like dianas

Blake said...

Ah, thanks Dumbom. I gotta go out and buy those old cameras to tinker with. It's fun faking it with iPhone apps, but taking the shots, having no idea what you're going to get, sending it in to get developed, then seeing the results on paper would be really cool.