Don’t expect to find preset filters with clever names when you download the photo editing app infltr. In fact, there is little to guide you in the styling of your photos with this app.
Just let go of what you’ve come to expect from an editing app and touch the picture. A circle appears, changing colors as it transforms the hue in your picture while you move your finger across the image. You may not know where you’re going, but eventually, the picture takes on a look to behold.
Instagram got the hint from users that they had grown tired of just squares and now allows mobile photographers to present horizontal or vertical pictures. But it’s still not a platform for sharing panoramic images.
A developer and frequent traveler, who grew tired of crops to his majestic captures, has created an app to bring sweeping panos to Instagram.
One of my favorite observations by a now-forgotten sage explained the difference between writing and photography like this: A bad sentence can be massaged, but nothing helps a bad photo.
So true. However, I’ve experienced for myself how a good photo-editing app can salvage sloppy composition or bad exposure — and even teach you something along the way. So if you resolve to become a better photographer in 2017, you might want to add some tools to put a finer finish on your iPhone photos.
Joe Cunningham loves the original iPhone so much that he carries two of them — one for calls and texts, and one for taking trippy photos enhanced by a mysterious glitch in the decade-old device.
Like the kind of haunted handset you’d find in a Stephen King novel, the second iPhone exhibits a strange quality: It takes pictures that look like they’re the result of a bad acid trip.
“The psychedelic iPhone only gets used as a camera because I want to extend its life as long as possible,” Cunningham told Cult of Mac.
Sports photographer Brad Mangin used to rush to an airport after a big game to get several rolls of film on the next flight to New York for processing and editing. He never saw what he shot until it was on the cover or a two-page spread in the latest Sports Illustrated.
Now his colleagues with their heavy DSLR cameras, lenses, and a laptop to transmit photos laugh when they see Mangin with his gear – an iPhone and maybe an external battery.
When lens maker ZEISS partnered with ExoLens to bring pro optics to the iPhone, mobile photographers had to make a choice between having great lenses or a protective case for the phone.
Now ExoLens has solved that, at least for the iPhone 7, with a protective case that will accommodate the ZEISS line of lenses. The new ExoLens Case will be on display at CES in Las Vegas this week and will be available for purchase within the next couple of months.
We roll our eyes when Tim Cook introduces a new iPhone and says, “This is the best iPhone ever” each year. But the iPhone 7 Plus will be different.
Sure, ambitious upgrades remain in the pipeline, but the remarkable camera in the iPhone 7 Plus will make this year’s model memorable. Fifty years from now, photography historians will talk about the iPhone 7 Plus they way they do the first Leica or the first Polaroid.
The geeky excitement shared by mobile photographers over the dual-camera of the iPhone 7 Plus has not waned.
And as they’ve played with the small optical zoom and blurring backgrounds in portrait mode, two small accessories companies have been quietly but furiously developing a two-lens attachment dedicated to enhancing the reach of the 7 Plus camera.
Want to take better smartphone photos without lugging around gear like a professional? Tripods are an essential tool for taking solid photos — or just engaging in a steady FaceTime conversation — and now you can get one that’ll fit right in your wallet.
The Pocket Tripod PRO is winning praise from the likes of Steve Wozniak for its clever design and convenience. (“Blew me away,” Woz told Gizmodo.) And right now you can get this miniaturized tripod for just $19.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
If you like watching a kid opening a gift at Christmastime, you might delight in watching a video posted by iPhone photographer Cielo de la Paz that shows her opening an unexpected gift from Apple.
For the second straight year, the self-taught photographer had one of her pictures selected for Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” marketing campaign. In addition to compensation for use of the photos for the campaign, Apple surprises the photographers with a coffee table book displaying photos selected for the Apple World Gallery.
Once again, the world’s most popular camera is a phone.
Smartphones, led by Apple’s iPhone, was the type of camera used most by photographers in 2016 on the photo-sharing site Flickr, according its annual analysis of EXIF data on pictures uploaded to the site.
The iPhone was in the hands of shooters for 47 percent of the pictures uploaded to Flickr. Canon and Nikon were second and third with 24 and 18 percent.
What is the best way to convince a global community of mostly digital photographers that they should pick up an old camera and shoot film? Put film on the iPhone.
That is exactly what Seattle-based Mastin Labs has done with its new film emulation app for iOS, Filmborn.
Publisher Pierre Le Govic turned his mission into the company name. Out of the Phone seeks to liberate the beautiful photographs being made today by smartphones.
His Paris publishing house has produced coffee table-worthy books of some of the best photographers documenting the world with their phones. Now Out of the Phone wants to make it easy for everyone to preserve their work with a tangible book.
For all the magical powers coded and wired into the iPhone camera, it can’t rise to every challenge. You still need light to make a decent photograph and good light can be as fleeting as the moments you are trying to capture.
But what if you could put good light into your pocket and pull it out when you need it?
The makers of the popular Lume Cube have created a nifty but powerful light called Life Lite, ideal for mobile photographers who want to keep shooting even as darkness closes in.
This week on The CultCast: Learn Instagram tips, tricks and techniques to take beautiful iPhone photos and build a massive following. Plus: The crazy exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 saga ends with a strange twist; rumors point to Macs with radically new e-ink keyboards; and an honest look at Siri versus the AI competition.
This episode is supported by CultCloth, the best way to keep your iPhone 7, Apple Watch, Mac and iPad sparkling clean. Check them out at CultCloth.co and for a limited time save 20 percent with code JetBlack.
Miroslav Tichy roamed the streets of his Czech Republic town with a camera made of plywood, a cardboard tube and a plexiglass lens he polished with toothpaste and cigarette ashes. His crude, distorted photographs now hang in museums around the world.
So don’t worry if the camera on that iPhone 7 you just purchased doesn’t score high in some laboratory test that pits its image quality against other cameras.
Thanks to a software feature on the iPhone 7 camera, Apple fans are getting familiar with a term once heard in a language only spoken by photographers – bokeh.
It’s a Japanese word that means blur and the bokeh in a photograph refers to the areas that are not in focus. Creamy and dream are the effects when perfectly executed, especially with portraits, where a tack-sharp face pops against a background swirled in colors, light and distorted shapes
Before there was even an iPhone, the art optics company Lensbaby was producing lenses that gave photographers an affordable option to bring maximum bokeh to their work. On Wednesday, Lensbaby introduced a 3-in-1 lens for mirrorless cameras.
I was raised by careful shoppers in a home where Consumer Reports magazine was like a second Bible. Cars, a new washer and dryer, and a vacuum cleaner to handle the then-new orange shag carpeting were not purchased without first consulting this venerable institution of objective product testing.
So I hit the pause button on my excitement for the iPhone 7 camera when I read a Consumer Reports review that claimed the iPhone 7 represents “no major leap in camera performance” from the 6s.
Photographer Landon Nordeman generally knows what to expect when ESPN calls him to shoot an event. But for the recent U.S. Open tennis tournament, ESPN needed Nordeman to report to the courts in Flushing Meadows, NY without any of his cameras.
Once there, an ESPN photo editor discreetly placed in his hands a sleek new piece of gear that would not be available to a clamoring public for two weeks – the iPhone 7 Plus.
“I was excited once I learned it was the iPhone, but thought I would only get to use it for an hour and have to give it back,” Nordeman told Cult of Mac. “I had the phone and shot with it for four whole days. I loved it. I really loved it.”
Their photography on the iPhone 6 and 6s was celebrated by Apple with glossy magazine ads, billboards and banners that stretched down skyscrapers.
But the photographers whose work fueled the “Shot on iPhone 6” marketing campaign are trading in the old technology for the shiny new iPhone 7, in most cases the dual-lens 7 Plus.
The word ‘selfie’ might make you smile or it might make you roll your eyes, but there’s a lot more to it than just front-facing cameras and goofy looking sticks. We’ve gathered some great tools for taking a wide variety of shots in a variety of situations, whether you’re trying to get the perfect jumping shot, experimenting with points of view, get shots or video from inside a car, or just more space for storing all of those photos. Any one of these could change the way you take selfies, so take a look:
In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, we introduce you to the iOS 10 beta 2, and give a hands-on look at the latest tweaks and updates to Apple’s latest operating system. More than 50 changes have been discovered by developers, affecting everything from Apple Music to widgets, and we uncover many of them this week.
Learn about “OSX/Keydnap,” the latest strain of malware intended to attack your Mac. Disguising itself as an innocent text or image file, OSX/Keydnap installs malicious code onto your machine. We’ll let you know how the malware works, and how to prevent this from happening to your Mac!
Peruse the stunning images of this year’s iPhone Photography Awards winners. iPhone photography has never looked so good. Plus, The CultCast, How-Tos and lots more.
All this, and much much more, in Cult of Mac Magazine, free for you right now.
Here are this week’s top stories.
The winners of the 2016 iPhone Photography Awards could have made their celebrated photographs with almost any camera. But the iPhone isn’t any camera and our amazement over it hasn’t waned.
And it won’t once you behold the incredible images of this year’s entries.
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.
