Tired of swiping through filters to make your iPhone pictures interesting? Or wasting time trying to stay organized behind the keyboard? Maybe you should take a look at these deals fresh off the deals boat. Below you’ll find a wireless, LED flash for any camera, two apps for improving your writing process, and a bundle of assets for designing apps. Take a look:
In this week’s packed-to-the-gills Cult of Mac Magazine, we give you the rundown on Apple’s new file system (APFS) — which has remained unchanged for 30 years. Discover all the reasons why switching to the new APFS makes sense for you!
Listen in to Kahney’s Korner podcast where our guest, Gumdrop Cases CEO Tim Hickman, talks about the race to be first to market with new iPhone cases, and the killing companies can make in the days following an Apple launch.
Learn about the growing number of professional photographers and filmmakers who are foregoing traditional equipment to embrace the iPhone for their creative pursuits.
All this, and much much more, in Cult of Mac Magazine, free for you right now.
Here are this week’s top stories.
The photographers were assembled with all their heavy camera equipment, about to walk 18 holes under the hot Florida sun to cover The Players Championship in Ponte Verde Beach when in strolled their colleague, Brad Mangin.
“Where’s your gear?” Mangin was asked. He pulled out his iPhone 6s to a chorus of groans and curses.
Accomplished photographers tend to bristle when asked to talk about equipment. It’s not the camera that makes the picture, it’s the photographer.
Acclaimed photographer Richard Koci Hernandez would tend to agree, but he’s likely to gush about his camera anyway. That’s because some of the most interesting and satisfying work of his career has come from shooting with his iPhone.
The kind of gear that once helped Hernandez garner Pulitzer Prize nominations now rests idly in a camera bag.
If you feel cheated over Apple not rolling out new hardware at WWDC this week, legendary optics company ZEISS has a little something to ease the suffering of iPhone users who love photography.
With the iPhone considered by many to be the world’s most popular camera, ZEISS brings its 170 years of lens design to mobile photography with wide-angle, telephoto and macro attachments for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. ZEISS partnered with accessory brand ExoLens and boasts the new mobile lenses will bring “gold-standard gear” to iPhone shooters.
The fun Jonathan Zufi had playing RobotWar on his high school’s lone Apple II in the early 1980s re-emerged one day. He just had to play it again.
The lark that led Zufi to an online search for an Apple II to play the game grew into the acquisition of more than 500 vintage Apple items, which he lovingly photographed, but then sold to fund production of a coffee table book that has sold more than 15,000 copies.
The more I grow to love photography with an iPhone, the more I miss certain things about conventional cameras. Get a grip, you say? A grip is one of the things I am talking about.
miggo, innovative makers of camera bags, straps and mounts, brings to Kickstarter the Pictar, an ergonomic camera grip for the iPhone that also shifts cumbersome menu functions to five programmable wheels and buttons right at the tip of your shooting finger.
In a few weeks, my partner and I are heading to London and Iceland for a two-week vacation. While London definitely isn’t a first for us, Iceland is. This trip also marks another important first for me: It’s the very first time I’m leaving my DSLR at home. I’ll be relying solely on my iPhone 6s Plus for all my photos.
Are you a budding photographer, who owns (or has access to) an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch? If so, you may be interested in entering this year’s IPPAwards, a.k.a. The iPhone Photography Awards.
Entrants are competing for the prestigious IPPA Photographer of the Year Award title, along with a assortment of other prizes.
Hipsters have been using the iPhone to document their meals on Instagram for years now, but the culinary geniuses at Bon Appétit are taking iPhone food photography to unprecedented levels for its March issue.
Bon Appétit sent its top photographers to shoot everything from food festivals to fine-dining dishes for next month’s Culture issue, only instead of lugging around their pro-level DSLRs and wide array of lenses, the photogs were only allowed to use their iPhones.
The end result is a gorgeous 43-page spread that will make your mouth water. The issue hits newsstands this week, but the company has already revealed some of the incredible photos that you won’t believe were shot on iPhone.
Long-exposure photography lets you capture light trails, motion blur and better low-light shots. While the iPhone’s built-in Camera app doesn’t let you control shutter speed and light sensitivity, lots of apps do. Slow Shutter Cam is my favorite — here’s how I’ve used it to capture long exposures with nothing but my iPhone 6 and a tripod.
For many of us, the iPhones in our pockets have long since replaced the need to carry around a regular DSLR or point and shoot camera. While the iPhone itself is typically all you need to start capturing great photos, there are a few iPhone camera accessories that can help take your iPhone photography to the next level.
These are some of my current favorites, all of which are compatible with the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus:
Apple is apparently reviewing samples of dual-lens cameras that may go into a version of the iPhone 7.
A tech website based in Taiwan reported Tuesday that Largan Technology, which currently supplies Apple with the bulk of its smartphone cameras, is one of three companies to submit samples.
If the pictures “Shot on the iPhone 6” were impressive, a dual-camera iPhone 7 could have the photography world again licking its chops.
Just how much further the technical quality could go with smartphone images is a future found in the work of an Israeli company called LinX Imaging, which happened to get purchased by Apple last year.
The longtime Kings of the Camera must know their kingdoms are shrinking. If Canon or Nikon need further evidence, Flickr’s 2015 Year in Review shows the popular tool of choice for an engaged and global photography community is not a dedicated camera. It’s first and foremost a phone.
Apple’s iPhone was the popular device used by the Flickr community, according to an analysis of the EXIF data on pictures uploaded to the site. iPhone cameras accounted for 42 percent of the photos on the site, compared to the DSLRs of Canon, 27 percent, and the Nikon, 16 percent.
Lens attachments for your iPhone can bring a fresh point of view to your photos but there are drawbacks. Some force you to remove the phone’s protective case to properly fit the lens. Others require a sticky mounting plate.
The mount for the Iris lenses by Photojojo looks like a little girl’s ponytail holder with a silicon housing holding one of three pop-in lenses that is attached to an elastic cord stretching and securing snuggly to diagonal corners of your iPhone or Samsung Galaxy.
The billboards and ads featuring beautiful photographs shot with an iPhone 6 are nearly gone. Apple is now promoting a new iPhone. But that does not mean Apple has forgotten the photographers whose work helped sell phones and treat the world to art in public spaces.
Photographers from the “Shot on iPhone 6” campaign have been getting packages in the mail, a pair of cloth-covered coffee table books featuring their work. The books were apparently a surprise and included a pair of white gloves for handling with care.
The phones in our cameras, especially with the release of the iPhone 6S, have become as good as what the pros use. Of course the pros also use more than just cameras to make their pictures look great, and iBlazr 2 brings one of the most important of them to your phone: a wireless flash. Right now it’s going for just $55.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Hipstamatic, the go-to photo app for discerning iPhone photographers, rolled out an expansive update today that lets hipness venture outside the square.
In conjunction with the availability of the new iPhone 6s and its 12-megapixel camera, Hipstamatic 300 is free for a limited time and features a ProMode for greater control, a darkroom suite with a range of editing tools, multiple formats rather than just a square frame and syncing to your iOS Photo Library.
We love our iPhone cameras because it takes away the need for technical know-how and leaves us with nothing but fun for our photography. But sometimes fun needs to be turned up a notch.
Enter the Creative Mobile Kit from Lensbaby, a two-lens package that turns any scene into a dreamy state of smeary colors and blurred shapes that surround the focus of a subject. Just clip on the kit’s magnetic mount bracket, select a lens and go play.
It sounds cool and convenient to say your photo album is in your phone. But your life spread across the pages of a glossy magazine sounds a whole lot better.
A new iOS app called Recently turns the camera roll on your iPhone into a monthly magazine. The one-step app is free and for a subscription fee of $8.99 a month, the creators will send you an elegantly designed magazine of up to 100 photos.
We love our photo filter apps, especially the ones that deliver the look and quality of classic film stock. These filters will never replicate the rich tonality and texture of film, but given the cost and hassles of using it, the average person probably feels they’re not missing much.
Deepak Mantena believes we’re missing out. The creator of digital studio Stay Kids has developed an iOS photo app called Base that lets you pick from 14 different film styles before you start making pictures.
Cult of Mac’s Photo Famous series introduces you to the groundbreaking photographers featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” ad campaign.
Michael Mainenti is in the developmental stages of a photography career, a point when he should be looking at the works of the established masters and saying, “Some day.”
Mainenti is faithful to this time-honored tradition except that some day is already happening. The 25-year-old college student is among the photographers whose work was selected by Apple for a global advertising campaign to show off the improved camera in the iPhone 6.
“It is a humbling feeling to see my work in the same advertising campaign with photographers I followed even before the launch of the ‘Shot on iPhone 6’ ads,” Mainenti told Cult of Mac. “It’s a boost of confidence and motivation to get better.”
Give Aaron Johnson the chance to give you his elevator pitch and he just might convince you that you need a tabletop photo studio.
But even if you accept his points, you probably don’t have studio know-how or the room for the lights, the tripod, backdrops and a ladder.
Johnson answers with the SHOTBOX, a collapsable tabletop studio with seamless diffused lighting with a setup that can have you camera-ready in seconds. The SHOTBOX is designed for iPhone and other smartphone users who want to make simple product pictures, digitize family photos and copy documents.
Cult of Mac’s Photo Famous series introduces you to the groundbreaking photographers featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” ad campaign.
The thick Icelandic fog lifted and Austin Mann saw an otherworldly glacier emerge. Photography is a way for Mann, a Christian and a professional travel photographer, to worship god, and this was the kind of scene that spoke to him.
But to get the shot, he would have to leave his camera gear in the car for a climb on all fours down a rocky cliff. Mann put his new iPhone 6 Plus in his pocket and scrambled down to make the picture.
The shot, taken using the iPhone’s panorama mode, was among the most prominent photos featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” marketing campaign, a promotional blitz that began in the spring with billboards, giant banners stretched across the sides of buildings, and advertising on television and in magazines.