iOS 8 packs in a bunch of great new photo features, in both the Camera app and the Photos app. You now get a lot more control over your photography at the front end, with manual exposure and even a time-lapse mode, and you can edit and find your photos with a little more precision than before.
iOS 8 is still a few months out, but you don’t have to wait: Use these currently available apps to add all these new functions to your iPhone (or iPad) today.
Kenan Aktulun founded the iPhone Photography Awards (IPPA) the same year the smartphone launched, when the idea that taking great pics with a camera phone was still pretty optimistic.
Seven years later, iPhone photography has developed to the point of documenting New York Times war coverage and tops four out of five of the most-used cameras on Flickr.
This year’s IPPA winners cover a suitably broad range of the world (54 photographers from 17 countries) and topics ranging from kids and architecture to landscapes and food.
Apart from letting you quickly edit and share photos (and always sitting, ready to go, in your pocket), the iPhone camera has one other great feature: It geotags every photo and video you shoot with the place you captured the imagery. You might not care about that now, but in the future when you wonder, “Where did I take that naked self-portrait?” or decide to take a look at your old vacation snaps, you’ll love geotagging.
Hell, half the time I use a map to find a photo — I can usually remember where I was better than when I was.
Lack of geotagging is perhaps the main reason I don’t take my regular camera out as often as I’d like, so I decided to do something about that. I’m using a combination of the iOS GeoTagr app on iPhone and iPad, plus a Fujifilm X100S camera and a Garmin EDGE 500 GPS bike computer.
Let’s take a look.
Apple finally fixed photography on iOS. Or rather, it’s fixed organizing your photos, wherever they might be. The iPhone is already a great camera. The problem was everything that happened after you tapped the shutter.
Now, in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, you’ll never have to worry about organizing your photos again — they’ll be everywhere, all the time. And best of all? It looks like you’re never going to need iPhoto again, on the Mac or on your iPad.
No matter which way you swing, this week’s gadgets have you covered. iPhoneographers can enjoy the Shoulderpod hand grip or slip the new iPad Olloclip onto their Mini or Air, and film nuts can get instant satisfaction with the new Lomo Instant Camera.
Camping? Take it easy in the giant Meriwether tent or go survivalist with the Blastmatch fire-starter. You can even choose how to arrive at the site, with accessories for your car or your bike. Happy traveling!
Cole Rise has nearly one million followers on Instagram and the hottest new photography app in the App Store. He also made seven of Instagram’s built-in filters, which explains where the name for the “Rise” filter originates.
His app, Litely, is less than a month old with over 3 million downloads. Considering he was one of the first 100 people on Instagram, he really gets mobile photography and where it’s headed. During our conversation, Rise goes behind the scenes of Litely’s development, shares his influence on Instagram during its early days, and gives some great advice on how to take better pictures.
Is it a stills camera? No. Is it a video camera? No. Is it something between the two? Correctamundo! The OTTO is a “Hackable GIF Camera” that uses a Raspberry Pi brain to make animated GIF pictures.
I have at least three apps set to auto-upload my iPhone photos whenever I reach a Wi-Fi connection. That’s three apps running in the background and using bandwidth to send my pictures up to the cloud, and they all run in addition to Apple’s own Photo Stream.
There’s nothing really wrong with this system: After all, bandwidth over Wi-Fi isn’t limited, and redundancy is good. But what if you could somehow consolidate all these services, and at the same save all your iPhone photos to a folder on your Mac? That’s what we’ll do today, with PhotoStream2Folder and a few other apps. We’ll take your Photo Stream, grab all the photos and save them to a folder on your Mac, then auto-upload them to Flickr, Dropbox and anywhere else you want.
I’m constantly checking out new photography apps for the iPhone, and like many out there, my favorite remains VSCO Cam. There’s a new contender on the scene that was released this week, and it’s definitely worth trying if you like experimenting beyond VSCO’s filters.
A new video app from the Hipstamatic team also just came out in the App Store, and it has some of the best filters for mobile video I’ve come across.
The first impression upon seeing Satechi’s new GoRemote Bluetooth remote-controller for the iPhone is oh man, that’s really freaking cool! Followed rapidly by wait, what am I going to do with this thing again?
SAN FRANCISCO — Even in a town populated by ninjas, gurus and rockstars, Mario Estrada may have the coolest job around.
He’s the Director of Fun for digital photo app Hipstamatic and hopes you won’t hate him for it.
“Most people don’t believe that’s my job, but a lot of thought went into the title,” he says, enjoying the sun from the rooftop lounge of the startup’s SOMA headquarters. “Someone asked once why I wasn’t the VP of fun, but that implies there’s someone more fun than I am. And you can’t be the president of fun, because, actually, being president is never fun.”
They were visiting colleges and he wanted it to be a “daddy-daughter” weekend. But the prolific, award-winning photographer gets anxious when he is not creating, so there was a point in the trip when he commandeered her iPhone, downloaded Hipstamatic and started making pictures.
As soon as he returned home, he purchased his own iPhone and it wasn’t long before the news photographer began making pictures for the first time that were truly about him.
His Instagram feed, a body of street photography images that grows larger by the day, has more than 19,000 followers. He loves how Instagram allows him to send pictures directly to people waiting and wanting to see them.
One December years ago, in London’s Piccadilly Circus, a Santa Claus sat in a pavement cafe eating lunch with an elf. Santa had a pint of beer in from of him. I raised my old film SLR, which was prefocused and had the exposure already dialed in, and took a couple of shots.
I hoped they’d turn out well.
“Who are those pictures for?” said a guy, shouting as he jogged toward me. He’d come from somewhere nearby because it was too cold for just a shirt on a December afternoon in London, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. I ignored him — there are a lot of nutters in Piccadilly any time of the year.
“Are you taking pictures of me?” he said.
This week we check out the best iPhone cases for using underwater. And seeing as the only reason to take an iPhone underwater is to snap pictures, we’re looking specifically at the camera capabilities.
Facetune is a great iOS Photo app to have laying around on your iPad or iPhone. It’s a photo-retouching app that will very quickly let you fix up funky faces. Not only does it take care of old foes like red-eye, but it’ll whiten teeth, smooth over the cruelest spray of acne, and even fix up folks whose eyes are too close together.
Are you a fan of HDR photography? Then you’re dead to me. Dead.
No, seriously.
Not really. Kidding aside, HDR can look horrible, like turning the color up on an old CRT TV set. But like all tools, it can also be used for the powers of good.
Anyhow, TrueHDR, the smash-hit iOS HDR app is now available for the Mac, letting you combine up to 100 shots into one over-egged exposure, all for just $4.
Snappgrip is an add-on camera grip for your iPhone, bringing the extra manual knobs, dials and buttons you miss from your regular camera. It’s been around for a while.
But that’s not the news. The new is that a couple of great iPhone camera apps now incorporate the Snappgrip API. That is, these apps can be controlled by the buttons on the grip.
Eye-Fi – the company that makes the Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards we use for covering trade-shows – has launched a Eye-Fi Cloud, a new app and service that stores all your photos in the cloud, whether you took them on your iPhone or a big fancy camera.
Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.
You might as well delete all the layer-blending apps on your iPhone or iPad right now, becasue Union is better than all of them. It comes from Pixite apps, the developer behind Unbound, LoryStrips, Flickring, Tangent and more, and it lets you stack images, then blend and manipulate them to stunning effect. How stunning? Take a look:
Oh man. It looks like “fairly well designed photo-storage and viewing services” are the new black. Or something. Now Amazon is back in the game with an updated version of Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, an app with a name only a Microsoft worker drone could love.
What’s new? Nothing less than the return of enjoyment.
Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.
The little Luxi turns your iPhone’s front camera into a light meter. A what? A light meter, a device that measures the amount of light falling on a subject so that you can set the exposure correctly on your camera.
But wait, doesn’t you camera already set its own exposure? Doesn’t it have a light meter built in for when i want to kick it old school in manual mode? Yes and yes, but this $30 widget might still be handy.
Buy it $30
Ever wanted to take photos of people without them knowing? Perhaps a sneaky shot of a pretty girl to help you “remember” her later, or some equally creepy bit of deceit? Well then, we have good news for you, you pervert: it’s the COVR Photo, an iPhone case which lets you shoot in secret.
The COVR has a little prism stuck on the back, and when want to use it you slide it into place. Now you can hold your iPhone like a TV remote and shoot whatever is in front of you while looking down at your iPhone’s screen.
Buy it $75
Here’s the Das Keyboard 4, possibly the most bad-ass clacky keyboard in existence. No keycap markings, USB 3.0, Cherry MX switches and a huge knob. All that plus Das’s trademark feature: it’s as big as a boat. A “Das Boat” if you will.
You know how when you leave a pack of cookies open instead of sealing them in an airtight jar? They still taste the same, but they get all mushy: the satisfying snap has gone out of them. That’s how I feel now when I use even Apple’s excellent keyboards. They’re mushy compared to my clackety Filco keyboard.
Buy it $169
Elgato’s Thunderbolt Dock has a few unique features that are appropriate for a company that makes video accessories for Apple devices. First, there’s an HDMI port around back, and second, the USB ports put out enough juice to charge your iPad at a decent speed.
Buy it $230
Pad&Quill is at it again, this time with a low-profile rear-shell style case for the iPhone 5/S. While calling anything from Brian Holmes’s P&Q “minimal” would be a stretch, the Traveler Case gets pretty close. It is also gorgeous to look at, and would surely be just as lovely for the hands. It looks like the kind of case you couldn’t stop fingering.
Buy it $80
The Confidant is a 192-page notebook, packed with blank, ruled or dot-grid paper. It opens flat, has its own cotton bookmarker, is covered in pale gray fabric and has neat, extra-wide pages.
There are also 12 perforated pages at the back of the book so you can tear them out without ruining the binding. My copy doesn’t have these, so maybe I have a beta version.
Buy it $16
The little Luxi turns your iPhone’s front camera into a light meter. A what? A light meter, a device that measures the amount of light falling on a subject so that you can set the exposure correctly on your camera.
But wait, doesn’t you camera already set its own exposure? Doesn’t it have a light meter built in for when i want to kick it old school in manual mode? Yes and yes, but this $30 widget might still be handy.
Lightroom for the iPad is here. It’s called Lightroom Mobile, and it runs smoothly on anything down to an iPad 2 (or first-gen mini). You can use the app to edit and organize any photos in your Lightroom collections, and it syncs automatically (and near instantly) with Lightroom on your desktop (you’ll need to upgrade to v5.4).
And the price? It’s free, but only if you already subscribe to Adobe’s $10-per-month Photoshop Photography Program, which also gets you the desktop versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. There’s also a 30-day free trial to check it out.
So how does it work? Lets take a nice long look.
Ever wanted to take photos of people without them knowing? Perhaps a sneaky shot of a pretty girl to help you “remember” her later, or some equally creepy bit of deceit? Well then, we have good news for you, you pervert: it’s the COVR Photo, an iPhone case which lets you shoot in secret.
