iPhoneography - page 10

Unless you’re young enough to think that the seemingly never-ending 80s fashion revival is actually cool, then it’s likely that you have a stack of real, printed photos in a box somewhere. And as we all know, printed photos are photos that you can’t post to Instagram, or backup on Dropbox.

What you need is to dig out that shoebox of pictures and send it off to somebody to scan.

With such a comprehensive leak now revealing the entire “lens camera” lineup in detail, it seems foolish to actually wait for an official launch to get all excited over the news of Sony’s totally left-field cellphone accessories. They’re actually standalone cameras, only the camera part is housed inside the lens, and they clip onto your smartphone, using it as the viewfinder and brain over a wireless connection.

Until the Olloclip came along and changed iPhoneography forever, I got along with stick-on magnetic lenses for my iPad and iPhone. They work fine, as long as you don’t mind having to glue a metal washer around your iPhone’s lens, or Lining the lenses up to the iPhone camera’s own lens by eye, every time you either installed it or just knocked it.

The PhoGo case fixes this while adding a bunch of other neat iPhoneography features to your iPhone.

Did you ever find yourself using the amazing Snapseed and thinking to yourself, “man, I love this app more than a man should love a piece of photo-editing software, but I sure wish it could do more. Like, what if it could save my edits as presets?”

Well, you lucky, app-loving deviant, you: your wish has been answered. No, not by Snapseed, which Google will surely kill off soon enough anyway, but by a brand new app called Photoristic.

Flickr’s iPhone app has gotten big revamp, and if it weren’t for another great photo app release today (called Photoristic), it could actually become my new favorite iOS photo editor. But what the “What’s new?” section in the App Store doesn’t mention is the new UI that accompanies it.

One of the best new features in iOS 7 is the revamped Photos app, which organizes your pictures for you, creating a timeline of events based on places. Eventiles for iPhone does something very similar, only it also chooses your best photos, and captions the resulting photosets — which it generates automatically.

It’s pretty rad.

It’s actually pretty easy to shoot sneaky pictures of people using the iPhone. You can pretend you’re doing something else as you point the camera at your unwitting/unwilling subject, or you can just hold the iPhone up to your ear, walk past them and snap a picture using the volume button.

Now there’s a third way: the Smartphone Spy Lens, an add-on that lets you shoot sneaky shots at 90-degrees to the camera’s own axis.

Ever tried to snap a self portrait with your iPhone? And I mean a proper self-timer self portrait, not an arm-out-the-side-of-the-frame selfie. It’s almost impossible. First, you have to deal with the lack of a self timer on the iPhone. And second, you have to find somewhere to balance it.

What you need is Joby’s new MPod mini.

In camera years[1], Canon’s G-Series is now drawing a pension and should really be scratching out a will. And when a product line is so successful and so mature, it gets hard to improve on it. The G15 had a big sensor, a fast ƒ1.8 lens and a handy front control dial, as well as all the rugged capability that made the G-Series last this long.

The new G16 adds very little, but it get one hugely handy update: Wi-Fi.

I never thought I’d describe a camera and iPhone accessory as “creepy,” but here we are. The Keizus is a quadropod (four-legged tripod) which looks like somebody ripped the skeleton out of one of those cymbal-bashing monkeys beloved of 1970s and 1980s horror flicks. Shudder.

It was only a matter of time before somebody put a SIM card inside a camera. That camera is the Q, comes from Sweden and is – according to the pitch – “world’s first social camera.”

But is it too late?

This post is as much for our Dear Leader Leander Kahney as much as it is for you, our wonderful and ever-curious reader. It solves a problem Leander struggled with for a full thirty seconds before tossing it to us minions in the Cult of Mac HipChat room.

The problem: How to get all the photos snapped by Leander’s twelve or so children into the same Photo Stream on the main family iMac.

For the solution, read on. Hint: it doesn’t need Photo Stream, and it uses a great feature of PhotoSync v2.0.

If ever proof were needed that pixel art’s deceptive simplicity requires a huge amount of work and skill, it’s here in the form of Belowrez, an iPhone camera app that measures its pixels not in the millions but in the tens.

Since the original iPhone in 2007, the iPhone Photography Awards have been showcasing incredible work from professional and amateur photographers. This year’s IPAA’s are no different, and the winners are on display. Selections were made for over 15 different categories from thousands of photos submitted from 38 countries.

One of the best things about shooting with the iPhone is that it automatically puts all of your photos on a map. This is even better when you’re traveling, as you can relive the trip with a virtual tour, or use the geolocation data to check where that awesome restaurant was where you got poisoned.

It’s easy. Sadly, the same can’t be said about pictures snapped with a regular camera. But there’s an elegant solution that uses your iPhone, and without worrying about recording and importing GPS tracks.

This is pretty awesome: How do you fancy having a proper, optically-zooming lens on your iPhone? That’s what the Sony ‘Lens Camera’ will do for you. These leaked shots show one version of the new device, which is actually an entire camera that lacks a screen and controls. These are provided by your iPhone (or Android phone).

Adding textured filters to your photos: RAD!
Adding pre-made textured filters to your photos? Lame.

That’s why you need to make your own filters right now, and Geri Centonze from iPhoneLife is here to tell you how.

Grain, light leaks, color shifts, low contrast caused by lens flare—these are all familiar Instagrammatical filters which mimic the limits of film. And ironically, they were all considered Bad Things when people actually shot with film.

Now we try to avoid digital noise just as we add back fake analog noise (grain). But what about native digital glitches? There is—as you have no doubt predicted—an app for that. It’s called Glitché.

The Ukrainian folks behind the iblazr, a little four-LED accessory flash that plugs into an iDevice’s 3.5mm jack, have almost doubled their $50K Kickstarter goal and now offer something new: a diffuser, included free with the flash.

Ever used your iPhone to take a photo through the viewfinder of your camera? Or tried to line up the iPhone’s lens with one half of a pair of binoculars? Then you’ll know how hard it is to get a good result. But if you’re willing to sacrifice an old iPhone case and pony up a few dollars for an SLR eyepiece, then you can make an adapter that’ll get you great Instagrammatical pictures every time.

Live histograms, saving layered images as PSD files, clone stamping, geotagging, layer masking… I’m talking about a desktop class app like Acorn, right? Nope. I’m listing features from Leonardo, an absurdly powerful universal iOS image-editing app.

There’s one safe prediction even prophecy-shy folks can make about the “next” iPhone: It will have a better camera.

But what does “better” mean these days? The 8MP photos from my iPhone 5 are more than big enough for editing, cropping and printing, so where does Apple go with the iPhone 5S?

If it listens to the biased opinions of the nerds who participated in DIY Photography’s latest poll, then the answer is not “more megapixels” but “better low-light performance.”

Possibly the most ridiculous omission from the iPhone’s camera app is a self-timer. If you want to take a selfie, or a group shot with you in it, or even a shake-free photo in low-light, then you’ll have to download a third-party camera app with a countdown timer built in.

Why is such a simple feature missing? Who knows? My cyclical side says that Apple is avoiding the inevitable lawsuits that would pour in when phones started getting snatched mid-photo whilst propped on the tops of inner-city walls.

Whatever the reason, Shuttr is here to fix the problem.

Squaready is one of my most-used photo apps on iOS. It has one purpose: to take your rectangular photos and turn them into squares by padding the edges, letting you post them intact to Instagram.

The trouble is, it’s ugly as sin, with the kind of interface that you’d expect to see if Linux and Windows XP got drunk on cider one night and had a little “surprise” appear nine months later.

Happily, Squaregram exists, and its a lot prettier. It also now works with Camera+, and has had some UI tweaks to make it even better.

The big upgrades you can add to your devices aren’t always going to be the ones that can make the biggest difference in how much you get out of them. It’s often the little innovations that can really change the way you use them. One example would be the much-talked about Tile, which goes beyond the iDevices we have and will serve to help us keep tabs on a slew of our personal belongings.

When focusing on little innovations for iDevices, Cablekeeps are a great example of an add-on you can use with your iPhone iPod, or iPad that does something small that can mean a lot more – like getting cable clutter out of your way. Cablekeeps allow you to wrap up the excess cord onto your Apple power adapter so that the unsightly extra length of cord gets wrapped up quickly and neatly for those moments when you want to grab and go everything you’ll need to charge those iDevices of yours. As a frequent traveler, this little innovation can be a big help in keeping the cable clutter down and ensuring you’ve got everything you need to keep powered when you take your iPhone on the road. If you want to get one of these – available in orange, light blue, or green – Cult of Mac Deals has them going for only $12.99 right now.