The KickLight is a $180 LED lamp for your iPhone. I hear you. “WHAT?!” you shout, in justifiable ALL CAPS. You even combine a question mark and an exclamation mark to further express your angered confusion. To which I can only say CALM DOWN. It’s actually worth the money.
Remember the Hitcase? It’s the “virtually indestructible” iPhone case that our own video jockey Michael Steeber checked out at this years CES. Now you can buy not only the case itself, but a range of neat-o accessories which let you put the thing on bike handlebars and car… Tubes?
It would be hard to convey how little I care about Google+, but I’ll try:
Google what? Plus? What’s that? Never heard of it. And if I had heard of it, I would probably forget about it in less than a minute.
Pretty good, huh? Yet despite this I actually quite like the photos part of Google+, although until now I haven’t been interested enough to post many photos to it. But the newly-updated Google+ app for iOS has just launched and it has all th cool new photo features announced by Google at its dorky Google Glasses 1
GeoTagBee is a brand-new iPhone app for recording your wanderings in order to geotag photos later. Yes, it’s my new obsession. GeoTagBee’s stand out feature is its simplicity, although it manages to pack in some neat features anyway. Let’s take a look:
It’s hard to believe, but some people don’t like the image-crunching, JPG-mangling special effects of app like Instagram. Instead, they want the output from the iPhone’s highly-tuned camera to be clean and as good as it can be. Which is why Olloclip’s new iPhone app goes in the opposite direction to most grungification apps and corrects errors introduced by the company’s clip-on lens of the same name.
You know how all your photos have a ton of extras tucked inside? Like – to pick a completely random example – the GPS data. And yet, whenever you send your vacation photos to your mom, she mails back to ask “where is that cool restaurant with the camel and the statue of Elvis outside?” or somesuch thing. Of course, you want to scream “Just look in the EXIF data, you idiot!” but, bring a good son/daughter, you just tell her. Again.
Well, a new app for the iPad and iPhone will help you make the implicit explicit. It’s called Map Camera.
PhotoExif is an app that lets you add EXIF data to photos shot with a film camera. You can dial in aperture, shutter speed, focus distance and focal length, along with notes about your photo, and when you get the photos back, freshly scanned from the lab, you can add the info to the digital images.
Microscope-like macro lenses are super neat — and not just because they let you see the little hairs on a ladybug’s leg. No, macro lenses can show you a whole new world. Or macro lenses can spark (or rekindle) a love affair with photography. Heck, at the very least, they’re good for hours of amusement.
There’s no shortage of macro lenses for the iPhone: There’s the high-end Olloclip, which also comes with a fisheye and a wide-angle lens; then there’s also this rubber-band macro from Photojojo, and these magnetic specimens.
Add to the list the new Carson ML-515 LensMag, a pair of iPhone macro lenses that clip magnetically onto the iPhone 5 — pretty standard fare. Only there is something different.
One question I get asked a lot (well, quite a lot anyway, considering the small size our team) in the Cult of Mac chatroom is "what camera should I get for taking better product shots?"
As reviews editor, this make me happy – of course I want better pictures on our reviews! – but the truth is that the iPhone is more than capable of making amazing product shots, especially as the target is a 640-pixel web-ready JPG.
With that in mind, Photojojo put together a tutorial for Etsy to help its users take better pictures of their home-made wares. The same advice also applies to your Ebay listings, pictures for your insurer or – yes – review shots.
Process, the step-based photo-editing app for the iPad, has gotten bumped to version 4.0. With that update come live, almost full-res previews, blend mode support and – supposedly – less crashes.
Apparently, there is a magnet somewhere inside the back panel of the iPhone 5. How do I know? Because these cool new lenses from Carson use it to stick themselves to the back of the phone. The result is something like a small, less-bulbous Olloclip, only for close-up photography.
There’s certainly no lack of great ways to share photos from your iPad: Photo Stream, iPhoto Journals, Dropbox, Everpix, Flickr and on and on. Despite this wealth of options, I’m going to add to your confusion. Fotopedia’s News Reporter for iPad is a new app that lets you turn your photos into gorgeous magazine-style news reports and publish them to Fotopedia’s site. It’s pretty great.
You know those cool mini DNG previews that let you take edit your RAW photos even when your don’t have the drive containing your photos connected to your MacBook Air? That tech could soon lead to Lightroom on your iPad. On Scott Kelby’s show The Grid, Adobe’s Lightroom boss showed off a prototype of the app.
Why buy some dumb iPhone telephoto lens when you could just drop $70 on an adapter that weds your iPhone with a pair of binoculars. That’s what Daniel Fujikake and Mac Nguyen were thinking when they came up with the SnapZoom, a universal mount to do just that.
Perfect B&W is a pretty great black and white photo app for the iPhone and the iPad (it’s universal). It’s built by OnOne Software, the folks behind high-end (and high-priced) desktop photo apps and plugins, and the results show it: Perfect B&W will let you make a great black and white conversion with one tap, or dig in and tweak almost every aspect of the picture.
GeoTag Photos Pro just hit v3.0, and with the update comes a new, less-ugly UI. It also adds automatic Dropbox uploading, making it just about the easiest (and still most battery-friendly) photo-tagging app for the iPhone.
FocusTwist attempts to turn your iPhone into a Lytro Light Field camera, complete with photos that can be focussed after you take them. How does it perform this technological magic? It cheats.
Yesterday, I visited the nerd-o-rama that is the annual Barcelona comics convention, and along with the overweight folks in too-tight superhero costumes, there were overweight folks in black t-shirts and sweatpants taking lots of photos. And their comfy clothing choices were explained by the fact that they had to carry like 20 kilos of glass in their camera bags.
Next year, they might be able to dress a little better whilst also saving their spines, using the Schneider iPro Series 2 lenses for the iPhone 5.
Pano Glitches are a the new fake light leaks. Only they’re better. Pano Glitching involves setting your iPhone to shoot a panorama and then dicking with it on purpose. Instead of following the instructions to smoothly sweep the iPhone across the scene in front of you, you can quickly switch views, or just jerk the phone in your hand.
A few weeks ago I plugged in an old hard drive and saw some scanned photos from when I used to shoot film. In my memory these pictures were some of the best I had ever taken, and I naturally blamed my tools for the fact that I hadn’t snapped anything better with my various digital cameras in the years since.
But you know what happened? I saw these old pictures and realized that they just weren’t that good. The fact is, I snap better pictures every week using my iPhone. And I think I know why. It’s all Instagram’s fault.
What’s your favorite Instagram filter? We all have one. Mine is X-Pro, and I almost never use anything else (except for no filter, which – according to Statigram – is my second most used “filter.”)
But what does this excessive use of one particular look say about me? Or – less importantly – about you? Luckily, there’s an info graphic for that, and it tells you your personality type according to InstaFilter Preference:
X-Pro II
The Optimist
The users see the world a little brighter and they want you to see it that way too. So what if it’s a gray day? They’ll make sure those raindrops pop against a windshield – and will then make the photo their new wallpaper.
Better is the definition of a “Normal” shooter. Anyone who goes commando in Instagram is either a techno-illiterate idiot, incapable of even tapping on a brightly-colored thumbnail, or “tech-savvy frauds, passing off pictures they fixed in other applications as #nofilter works of art. You’re not fooling anyone.”
As somebody whose first Instagram picture was a “#nofilter work of art,” imported into my iPad 2 from a Panasonic GF1, I can say that this entry at least is pretty accurate. Go check the rest out at the links below.
Picfari is a smart little iPhone app which tells you where all the best photos are to be taken – wherever you are. Say you’re on vacation in, I don’t know… Barcelona, Spain. Fire up the app and it’ll not only let you browse photo hotspots, it’ll also pull in great sample shots from places like Flickr, and even give you some tips on getting the best shots.
The iPad is great for photographers, but the built-in Photos app sucks. You can’t change the viewing order. Making albums and moving photos is a multi-tap pain in the ass, and navigating is confusing even for the experienced user.
That’s where Focus Point comes in. It’s a photo-viewing app that’s been around for a while, but the latest update adds enough new goodies to make it worth a look.
Tempted as I am by the likes of the amazing Fujifilm X100s, I know that I’ll keep coming back to my iPhone 5 camera thanks to its combo of convenience, quality, connect-ability and apps. But the Sun & Cloud camera has just the right balance of price to quirky novelty to get me interested.
A picture is worth… $1. That’s what Printic will charge you for a single, Polaroid-shaped print, sent to your (or anyone else’s) door and ordered from the easy comfort of your own iPhone.