Instagram: gimmicky retro filter-fest or serious social network? Time Magazine seems to thing it’s the latter, and despatched five pro photographers to go out and shoot the aftermath of super-storm Sandy with their iPhones, posting the results to Time’s Instagram feed.
The iPad Mini is here, and it is lying naked and vulnerable on your desk/bed/lap/passenger seat. And that’s ok, because today is all about tweaking and configuring your settings, installing apps and seeing which of your pants have back pockets big enough to carry it (don’t sit down!)
But what of tomorrow? Soon you’ll start searching for cases, speakers, docks and other accessories for the latest tiny addition to your family, and that’s where we come in. Yes, you can use most of your iPad and iPhone accessories with the new Mini, but here are some add-ons which work particularly well with Apple’s littlest tablet.
The iStabilizer is a combination monopod and camera/phone tripod adapter. It’s light, it’s sturdy, it’s mostly aluminum, and it’s pretty much ideal for occasional use. And it has one fantastic function which will probably get you arrested.
Quick test: see if you can guess what the following product does, just by decoding its cryptic name. Ready?
Belkin NetCam Wi-Fi with Night Vision
The iPhone 5 is the best camera Apple has ever made (OK, maybe the second-best), so why not dress it like one of the best film cameras ever made?
That’s just what PetaPixel’s Leica skin will do, turning your long, thin iPhone into a long, thin fake rangefinder.
How does the new iPod Touch’s 5MP camera size up to the iPhone 4’s low-light-loving 8MP monster? IMore’s Leanna Lofte decided to find out, pitting the cameras head-to-head in a rather extensive test. The short form: if you were thinking of buying the iPhone 5 just for the camera, you could probably save yourself some money.
Purple Haze, is in my brain… Ah, sorry. Just singing a little Hendrix there. But — completely coincidentally — this next app brings purple haze correction to the iPhone. If you want to listen to Jimi Hendrix songs as if played on an un-amplified classical guitar, then this may be the app for you.
If Rick Deckard had carried an iPhone in the movie Blade Runner, and he’d used a camera app, that app would have been BLUX. Not only is it a pretty great iPhone camera replacement app, but it has all the bleeps, bloops, on-screen graphics a futuristic sci-fi replicant could ask for. Hell, it even has a neat computer voice that offers photographic advice.
This amazing chunk of technology is – unbelievably – home made. It’s a camera, it is milled Apple-style from a single block of aluminum, and it’s called the Hyperscope. What’s not to love?
ThrowMeApp is a camera app which will magically turn your Android phone into something useful. The idea is that you keep your precious iPhone safe in your pocket and then toss your Android phone into the air as high as it will go.
The app then takes over, firing the shutter automatically and snapping an aerial shot of you. neat, right?
Just $124 will buy you the mCAMLITE, an aluminum case for your iPhone 5 which lets you attach all manner of photo and video accessories, as well as making it easier to hold.
No, this isn’t a stylish retro-camera case for fauxtographers, but it is a serious tool for photographers and videographers.
It used to be that Mac owners had to wait for an OS update to get RAW support for their new cameras. This — of course — meant a long wait. Now they pop out whenever they're needed, and you don't even have to restart your Mac.
It's like we're living in the future and, with Marty McFly arriving on his hover-board in just three years from now, that's exactly how it should be.
I own a cheap plastic tape measure. I also own (or rather, haven’t yet tossed out) a conference lanyard with a retractable card holder for my laminated ID.
Why am I telling you this? Because both of them look just like the Memoto, a teeny-tiny lifeblogging camera which you wear around your neck or clip on your clothes. Like both of my crapgadgets, the Memoto is small and inconspicuous. Apart from the bright-orange color…
Back in June, when I first reviewed the C-Loop camera strap mount from Custom SLR ($40), my favorite camera strap and mount was actually the RS-5 system from a company called Black Rapid. But since those long summer days, though I still really love the RS-5, I’ve noticed that the C-Loop has really grown on me and has become my de-facto strap mount.
After three months of use, I think I now know why, and in that time, I’ve also been able to identify some C-Loop issues my first review period was unable to reveal.
Nikon’s new 1 V2 is a super-serious enthusiast camera built around a joke of a toy sensor. The $900 camera ships with a 10-30mm kit lens, the crop factor of which should tell you all you need to know about this camera range: 2.7x turns the 10-30 into a 27-81mm equivalent.
Joby’s latest attempt at building stands for smartphones seems to finally be a winner. Instead of cases or stick-on adapters, the GripTight range simply clamps the target phone with a pair of spring-loaded jaws, and joins it to various supports.
IoShutterCam is a neat, new take on iPhone camera apps. Instead of focusing (ahem) on adding filters to your images and sending them off to ever more social networking services, the new app instead concentrates on capture.
If you’re interested in time-lapse, triggering your shutter with sound, or many other neat shutter-tripping functions, then the $3 ioShutterCam is for you.
Here’s an incredibly neat little hack for making your iPhone’s flash suck less, and it’s marred only by the photo used to illustrate it, which features some kind of Android “phone.”
If you ever wondered how you might use colored gels on your iPhone’s flash, read on. Or just look at the picture — it’s pretty self explanatory (once you get over the inexplicable purchase of an Android handset anyway).
The iPhone’s camera is a little wonder, not least in its actual physical manifestation. The tiny lens is now capped with a crystal cover made from the same scratch-shrugging glass used for high-end watches. And all it takes to clean off the daily gunk is a quick rub on your pants leg.
But that hasn’t stopped the folks at Ace Display (ace name, BTW!) from designing a redundant case to protect and clean that same lens.
Lomo has launched yet another gorgeous new film camera, and this one looks as lame as all the rest. It’s called the Belair X 6-12, and it’s medium format.
Here’s a neat idea: at least until all cameras have built-in Wi-Fi anyway: It’s a Wi-Fi SD card adapter — like the Eye-Fi cards, only instead of packing their own flash storage they have a hole which will happily hold a the microSD card of your choice.
Thus, you buy the adapter once, and stock up on a (small) pocketful of mini memory cards. This, the thinking goes, will be cheaper and more future proof than building Wi-Fi into every damn SD card you use.
Logitech’s new Broadcaster webcam is just what it says it is: a webcam for live-streaming video, and for shooting podcasts. But that makes it sound boring, so how about this: The Broadcaster shoots 720p video, can connect to your Mac, iPad or iPhone via Wi-Fi and works with most of your built in (Mac) apps.
And, amazingly, there’s more:
Those ruggedized cases that turn your iPhone into a handy sports-cam? They can go suck it. GoPro has popped out a new sequel in its Hero lineup and it shoots 4K video whilst also being way smaller and lighter than its predecessor.
Perverts rejoice! Now there’s an iPhone accessory which will let you shoot pictures of pretty girls in public without anyone ever knowing. And it’s even better than a specially adapted camera, because you can just pretend to be like checking your messages or whatever.
It’s called the HiLo lens, and it puts the “can” and “did” into “candid.”
MagFilters are — surprise! — filters for your compact camera which are attached to the lens by magnets. Unlike SLRs and other interchangeable-lens cameras, compacts lack the interior thread on their lens which lets you attach these light modifiers, so MagFilters take a leaf out of the iPhoneographers book instead.