Michael Raskop is a German photographer based in Lucerne, Switzerland, and is the guy responsible for this set of cool artistic images of iPhones seemingly flying effortlessly in mid-air. Cult of Mac got in touch with him to find out how – and why – he made them.
Earlier this month we reported that MacPhun squeezed their outlandishly colorful Color Splash Studio Mac app onto the iPhone. Today, they’re giving away free copies of the Mac app, with one small catch: You have to send them something you created on the iPhone version of the app.
It seems that my whining prayers for native iPad photo apps have started to answered by the developing gods. And how! MiniatureCam is not only an iPad-specific tilt-shift app, it is fantastically designed, too.
Instagram was just updated with its first big tweak since it was bought by the Evil Empire, and much of the buzz is about the new Explore section, which replaces the useless Popular tab (which mostly featured I Shot Myself-style self-portraits of pretty girls, and cats).
But Facebook designer Keegan Jones Tweeted out an awesome little tip: long-pressing on the camera icon launches you right into your camera roll.
Booster lets you customise filters before you take the photo.
You probably love Instagram filters, and all the other image-tweaking filters in the myriad apps available for your iPhone. But no matter how many you try, they are all just presets.
What if you could make your own presets instead? That’s the promise of Booster!, an iPhone 4/s (or iPad 3 if you don’t mind pixel-doubling) photo app with infinitely changeable live filter effects.
Want to take your iPhone to the beach? Fancy taking it with you for a swim and snapping some sweet underwater snaps? Or are you just a friendless loser who is so repulsive that they can’t even find somebody to look after their stuff while they go for a quick dip?
If any of these apply to you, then you might like to take a look at Photojojo’s new iPhone Scuba Suit. And if the last applies to you, then go ahead and buy this waterproof case, but just stay away if you see me by the ocean, OK?
Summer time is vacation time, at least here in the U.S. With kids out of school for the warmest months of the year, families travel to amusement parks, historical sites, and even to other countries, making memories along the way.
What better way to store the photographic memories from this summer’s vacation than with high quality photos, edited, stored, and shared with just your iPad and iPhoto? Sound like a dream come true? Well, it’s not only possible, it’s fairly simple. Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks to use with iPhoto for iPad
Does Instagram really make your photos better? If you’re shooting them with the crappy camera in the original iPhone – for which the app’s grungy filters were designed – then the answer is yes. But what about the iPhone 4S, or any other camera – even film?
Allen Murabayashi decided to find out. He grabbed a handful of famous images from the web and ran them through everybody’s favorite photo grungifier. From Neil Leifer’s iconic 1965 shot of Ali vs Liston through Steve McCurry’s Kodachrome-tastic Afghan Girl to a shot from the royal wedding, all of them suffer from being Instagrammed.
Aviary is a weird old service. It’s a web-based photo-editing suite that runs in HTML (and therefore the iPhone and iPad), but there’s no actual Aviary site where you can upload images and fiddle with them.
Previously, the easiest way to get access was to go to Flickr, but since nobody uses Flickr anymore, that was kind of lame. Now, though, somebody has licensed the Aviary APIs and made an iOS app. Right now it’s iPhone-only, but it’s pretty damn good.
Photo editing is all about making changes to the visual image, using your own aesthetic preferences to make the picture just that much better than the original. With some simple tricks in iPhoto for iPad, you can make that good photo better, and that great photo sing.
iPhoto has three tools that you can use to do just that. Brighten, Zoom, and White Balance. While the features may be fairly intuitive, it never hurts to point them out, as not all of us are intuitive in the same way.
Man, is the Diff case a neat little iPhone case. It starts out as a tough case with a tripod mount (Zzzzz) but quickly picks up thanks to a clever cover and a pro-level lens mount.
Pris is a ridiculously simple new camera app for the iPhone which nonetheless manages to give you all the features you actually need, only without getting in the way. Shoot with the iPhone in portrait orientation and it’ll snap square photos and videos, ready for Instagram. Flip the iPhone into landscape and Pris will shoot super widescreen video and stills in a Star Wars-like 2.25:1 aspect ratio. There’s more, but in principle that’s the entire app.
If you often find yourself using your hand to hold your iPhone while you film or photograph, please allow me to introduce you to the Woxom Slingshot ($15), the neat little gadget that makes it a snap to hand-hold your iPhone while you use its front-facing camera.
Now you too can steal Wi-Fi info and skirt privacy issues.
Street View is fantastic. You can check out a hotel’s façade before you even book a room, you can walk down a street where you remember there was this awesome store, only you can’t remember its name, or you can wander through far-off cities.
Now, you can make your own Street Views, with this camera and software kit from DIY Streetview.
Imagine that you stood in one place and took a bunch of photos in different directions. Now imagine that you printed these photos onto glass sheets and arranged them in the same planes that they were shot: the picture you took of the sky is horizontal, facing down. The mountain off to the left is upright and facing right.
Now imagine that these pieces of glass magically intersect to make a lattice which you can turn to view, and that those pieces of glass disappear from view when they are edge on.
You just imagined Stilla, a great new iPhone app which does all of this for you, without harming a single sheet of glass.
SnapFocus is a clever camera gadget from Brandon David Cole. It’s a rig made from bike brake levers, cables and cogs, and it allows a single person to both operate a camera to shoot video, and to pull focus at the same time.
I test a lot of gadgets, and so I inevitably have stacks of USB cables left over. I’m pretty sure that a geek like you also has more than his or her fair share of wires. But I’ll be that none of them is as handy as the Twig, a bendable, pose-able iPhone cable that doubles as a tripod.
CanvasPop turns your iPhone photos into works of art.
When the folks at CanvasPop emailed to tell me they wanted to print one of my Instagram photos onto a canvas and mail it to me, I felt a little like I was being stalked. They’d even picked out the photo ahead of time – one I took while I was testing out the excellent TIFF-shooting 645 Pro app.
Still, I wasn’t so creeped out that I wouldn’t send my address, so a week or so later a huge package arrived with the picture inside. And it’s pretty neat.
Photography is one place where older is definitely better — for now at least. We take amazingly high quality photos with our digital cameras and then add filters, grain, vignetting and all manner of other imperfections to make those pictures look like they were shot on film cameras. And not even good film cameras: pretty much all of the effects we use mimic defects in the photo processes of old.
Now, with Osmo Leaker, we have an app whose sole purpose is to add simulated light leaks to our photos. Tap the film-cartridge icon and random orangey strips will be added to your photograph, just as if you had accidentally opened the back of the camera before you rewound the film. Don’t like the result? Tap again. Decided you actually did like the previous leak better? No problem, you can go back (in the Pro version).
When you’re done, you can export to the usual places — Facebook and Twitter — and also save to the camera roll or open the image in Instagram. And that’s it: Osmo Leaker is a one trick pony, but it performs that trick very well. There are two versions available, a free version and a $1 pro version. The Pro app has more effects, full-res export and no ads, as well as the back button for fickle mind-changers.
All this has me wondering how ridiculous this retro-fication might be if applied to other technology. Low-res movies with barrel distortion to replicate the crappy picture of an NTSC CRT TV? Crackles and pops applied to lossless music to simulate vinyl? Wait, that last one actually exists!
Those of us over a certain age have a lingering hangover from the days before digital: actual photographs. If you’re lucky (and extremely well organized), yours are neatly displayed on the walls and in labelled albums. If you’re unlucky (or plain lazy, like me), they’re shoved in cardboard boxes and left in cupboards to rot. That’s not how it should be, is it?
The Trygger is a William Blake joke just waiting to happen
If William Blake was alive today, and was pitching an iPhone case on Kickstarter, he might have called it The Trygger. Alas, he dies in 1827, long before either the iPhone or Kickstarter were invented, leaving the fate of the Trygger in the hands of Scott Phillips and Joel Kamerman.
The Trygger is a bumper-style case with a very clever sliding back which houses a polarizing filter. And if you have a nagging feeling that polarizers are the new fisheyes in the world of iPhone accessories, you’d be right — we covered a clip-on polarizer just last week.
One of the hallmarks of great Apple software is that it makes you smile like a kid when it does something unexpected and undeniably cool. The first time you pinch-to-zoom, for example, or when you swipe over a picture in iPhoto for iOS and it automatically applies a correction depending on what’s under your finger.
The other hallmark of Apple’s apps is that they look great.
Scalado’s PhotoBeamer manages the first of these things, appearing to work as if by magic. On the second, though, it fails somewhat.
If you happen to own a LUMIX DMC-FX90, you might be interested to know Panasonic has dropped an app into both the Play and App Store to allow users to view and control certain aspects of their camera remotely. The LUMIX remote allows your Live View screen to be displayed on your smartphone. As long as you perform a firmware update to your FX90, the LUMIX remote app will provide you with:
It sure is ugly, but the SlateSHIELD makes up for it by being so useful
It looks like somebody finally answered my prayers for an iPad 3 case which would let me take photos without dropping the thing or looking like a complete dork. Instead, I can look like I’m some kind of clipboard-wielding
corporate drone taking a photo with an iPad.
The case is called the SlateSHIELD (I think you’re supposed to shout the last part whilst punching the air with your free hand) and it has a rotating handle on the back, as well as a flip-out kickstand. And crucially, it isn;t huge and fat.