Quick quiz – How do you hold your iPhone when you’re taking video? And when you’re shooting photos? If your answer is “Uhhhh…. Depends? I don’t know…” then you are just like me. I never quite know which way up it is, or whether my finger is on the shutter release (volume switch), or whether the app I’m using even lets me use the volume switch to take a picture (cough Instagram cough).
The ShoulderPod is designed to fix that, adding a stand and a fat grip to the iPhone.
Pure is an iPhone Flickr app which looks ready for iOS 7 already. As the name suggests, there’s a focus on plain and simple design, and the lack of button-shaped buttons makes even the cleanly-designed official Flickr app look cluttered. However, you mightn’t be switching to Pure just yet, as it lacks a fair bit of basic functionality.
Exif Manager for iPhone and iPad does one thing – it lets you view and sort your photos by various metadata attributes. Want to see all your pictures in descending order of shutter speed used? You can do that.
In the right hands, the iPhone Makes a great camera. And in the wrong hands, even the best DSLR or rangefinder will spit out crap. This is the truth behind the SunTimes/DarkTimes Tumblr, a blog which highlights the terrible photos that the Chicago Sun Times is publishing ever since it fired all its photographers and let the writers snap pictures with their iPhones.
The result is clearly shown above.
Everpix 2 has launched, and it takes everything you love about the all-photos-everywhere service and makes it easier to use. It also introduces the comedically inaccurate Explore feature which mistakes breakfast for human faces.
And no, it still doesn’t work in portrait orientation.
Triggertrap has released a new dongle which lets you fire real camera flashes using your iPhone. This brings you into the realm of high-speed photography — the kind where people shoot bullets through balloons of water and capture the image.
I no longer have to bother with the swapping of lenses since I traded in a box of the things for the fixed-lens Fujifilm X100S, but when I did I found that I never had enough hands to do it (for the record, I have the usual number of hands: two). If I’d been desperate enough, then, I might just have opted for the Spider Holster Large Pro Lens Pouch, a dork-tastic accessory which is nonetheless very practical.
Hands up anyone who knows what a light meter is? You at the back… speak up… No, it’s not a way to tell how much electricity you use to illuminate your home. Fine, I’ll tell you: it’s what we used to use to measure light and set the exposure on our cameras, back before they were so good at doing it themselves.
Oddly enough, this weekend I found myself in need of one. And then what do I see in my inbox? The Lumu, a light meter for the iPhone.
Bonzart’s Ampel is a cool-looking — and cheap — digital camera styled on the TLR (twin-lens-reflex) cameras of old. But the retro case design isn’t just a gimmick: the Ampel actually packs some great featurres into the old-fashioned shape, including a dedicated tilt-shift lens.
It looks like iOS 7 adds a digital zoom to the video-camera app. You’ll need to be running it on an iPhone 5, but if you are, you can zoom in 2–3x as you shoot. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be the crappy digital zoom used for stills.
Lightroom-using, iPad-owning readers might remember an app called Photosmith. It promised to let you sync your photos ’twixt iPad and Lightroom and let you add tags, keywords and metadata, as well as selecting picks and rejecting the crud before syncing everything back again.
The trouble was, it was confusing as hell, and crashed every few button taps. Now we have version 3.0, and it is everything the original tried to be. In fact, it’s pretty great.
Yahoo has bought the developer of the fantastic iOS apps PhotoForge and KitCam. Ghostbird’s software team will now work for Yahoo, helping to make Flickr even better. And – as ever with these things – development on both apps will stop.
You know what’s great? Magnets. You know what’s equally great? Filtered photos. Which makes this little DIY project – using both magnets and homemade filters – double great, right? Right guys?
It looks like the new photo filters in iOS 7 are lossless. That is, the original, untouched image file is saved as is, and the effect is applied on-the-fly. This is how non-destructive editing apps like Lightroom and Aperture do their thing.
Shared Photos Stream in iOS 7 are turning out to be a much bigger deal than I first thought. After playing with them for a few hours it’s clear that they might actually be Apple’s first successful social network. Why? It’s all down to a little “Activity” tab inside the newly-named “Shared Streams.”
IOS 7 looks fantastic, and the good news is that photographers haven’t been left out of the updates. There’s new stuff in both the Camera app as well as Photos: a neat combination of flashy new features and great little fixes that will make both apps what they probably should have been to begin with.
I’m not going to list all the problems with Apple’s iPhotos for OS X. I’ll just say that it’s clunky, slow, the library bloats as fast as a mob informer that’s been dumped in the Hudson, Photo Stream doesn’t work reliably and – every frikkin time I switch back to the app – it flips to the “Last Import” section in the source list. So I set out to find an alternative. This article will tell you all about my final choice – called Pixa – and a little bit about the alternatives.
VSCO Cam has already become one of our favorite camera apps on the iPhone thanks to its film emulation effects and clean interface, but a big update for the app is making us fall in love all over again.
Visual Supply Company just released VSCO Cam 2.0 on the App Store and it comes with a huge batch of new features, including new presets, more efficient editing, and separate Focus and Exposure rings that give you more control when shooting pictures.
Best of all, Visual Supply Co. dropped the price on VSCO from $0.99 to free so there’s no reason for you not to give it a whirl. You can pick it up from the App Store now, or dig into the full list of new features after the jump:
The iPad is pretty great for photographers, but in typical Apple fashion, if you want to really use the device then you keep knocking up against crazy and annoying limits. The most obvious of these is probably the whole iPhoto/iPhoto problem: two apps, for Mac an iOS, that share a name but little else. They certainly don’t share their photos.
So what would I like to see fixed in iOS7? Here’s a list, complete with some suggestions for making things better
https://instagram.com/p/Zi-AAmGBqM/
The square cropped photo has never been more popular thanks to Instagram. There are a lot of benefits to being challenged to shoot within the confines of Instagram’s square — plus square photos make for easier browsing — but a lot of times cropping down to a square cuts out a lot of beautiful shot.
Even though Instagram forces users to upload square pictures, there are lots of ways to get around it. Not only can you post oblong pictures at whichever aspect ratio you want, you can also crop images into circles, triangles, and all sorts of other shapes.
Here’s our guide on how to break out of Instagram’s square:
Still using that Ikea wind-up kitchen timer to take your time-lapse videos? Ditch it, because somebody has finally come up with a purpose-made iPhone motion rig that is cheap, fits in your pocket and can do double (triple?) duty as a panoramarator[1], and a passive sound-amplifying iPhone dock.
Camera Noir is just about the most basic B&W photo app I have ever seen. And yet, miraculously, it seems to have included just the right features. I can tell you in two words what you can tweak: almost nothing. And yet the results are fantastic.
Pixter is an interesting idea, although one which is – possibly – doomed. Here’s the elevator pitch: Pixter is a for-pay Instagram.
Eye-Fi’s new Mobi cards are designed to work better with iOS and Android apps, making wireless transfers from your camera to your iDevice much easier. The iOS app has been updated, too, bringing support for the iPhone 5’s larger screen, just 8 months after it was launched. This, combined with the crappy non-native OS X app shows that Eye-Fi is getting really serious about Apple gear.
Remember Merek Davis’ Mextures? They were a bunch of image files for adding textures to your iOS photos using Photoshop Touch or other layering and blending apps. Now Merek, who was so proud of these textures that he named them for himself, has made an app.