iPhoneography – Part 2

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in iPhoneography

Tags

App Store, art, Glaze, Hipstamatic, iPhone, iPhoneography, Photograph, red brick wall, Shopping, Smartphone, technology, Visual Arts, wrought iron gates

Morning

Since being bitten by the iPhoneography bug and falling in love with “Hipstamatic” I have been filling up my camera roll pretty frequently. But whilst I’ve been having a lot of fun doing so I started to want more – as a photographer and artist I felt that I should be creating art that would not look out of place on my living room wall.

A tall order with just a smartphone and no fancy lenses.

But over the holiday period I decided to go out specifically with the intention of capturing some images that, metaphorically speaking, would look good on my living room wall.

I was pretty happy with my resulting set of images, as photographs, but not as wall art, for that I needed a little bit of post processing to be done, but in the spirit of creating art using just my smartphone I downloaded a smart little (free) app from the app store called, Glaze.

This app turns your photos into actual paintings – pretty apt for what I wanted to do – with a little experimenting some pretty cool results can be achieved. After playing around with different settings and varying degrees of strength I opted for these.

Just a VW

Man in a red jacket

Wrought Iron Gates

Parking Bay outside Halfords

Red brick wall with ladder

Of course, you actually have to go out and take an image first, and not every image works and some images work better than others

but….

Would I have them hanging on my wall in the lounge – definitely

Is it art – absolutely

Best – Colin

iPhoneography (colincrowdey.com)

Facebook – to share or not to share.

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in General, Photography

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

blogging, business, content consumption, Facebook, facebook friends, Facebook Timeline, FB, IPad, iPhone, Online Communities, photo sharing, Photograph, photography, photos, social media, Social network, social networking, technology, Uploading and downloading

Morning,

Facebook is big, no, Facebook is HUGE, there are 7 billion people in the world and as of September 2012 there were 1 billion active Facebook accounts!

A staggering 44% of all Internet users are Facebook users and there are 600 million mobile Facebook users.

Facebook is hugely popular for sharing photos, in fact there are reports that we upload 300 million photos a day, every day and some figures are available to suggest that Facebook hosts nearly 230 billion of our photos – truly mind staggering figures.

It’s very easy to see from these figures that content we upload can be seen by a huge amount of people around the world. This can be fantastic for getting content seen by the masses, we are becoming a content consumption society, with our iPads & iPhones we constantly crave content, consuming with an insatiable appetite.

But problems can arise when content is posted that specifically elicits opinions from the masses. A good example if this happened recently, a clothing designer took a photograph of a model wearing one of his new designs, he immediately uploaded the photo to his Facebook timeline and asked for opinions on the photo. As expected there were tens of responses from his Facebook friends all saying things like, “wow, great photo”. But then someone shared that post with a person outside his circle of friends (Facebook security is overly complicated – but that’s another post)

Very soon the post generated slightly less favourable comments – nothing too disparaging – just constructive criticism. As is the way Facebook works I saw this post on another timeline, the picture was of a very well known model, and the clothes looked great on her, but the overall photo could have been significantly improved.

Within 30 minutes of the first “negative post” there were dozens of truly horrible comments made, mostly, believe it or not, by the original poster, the clothing supplier, in response to the negative comments. I watched the thread descend into vitriol and abuse and I finally reported the Facebook user when death threats were made.

The post was swiftly taken down by Facebook and I heard the clothing supplier server a three day Facebook ban.

The point of this story is that art, all forms of art, be it music, paintings, photos etc is very subjective, just because you think it is fantastic, does not mean everyone will think it’s fantastic. With a billion Facebook users you can bet there will be some that don’t like your art. The masses are not qualified to give objective opinion, if you want or need objective opinion find and join one of the many Facebook groups that suits your particular art form.

Best – Colin

The Two Types of Photographers

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Photography

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Colour Correct, forum expert, forums, gadgets, Histogram, Internet Forums, Nikon v Canon, photography, Raw v JPEG, technology

Morning.

There are two types of Photographers, those that go out and create pictures. And those that talk about it instead.

Photographers that go out and create pictures are usually either, a) out creating pictures, b) editing those pictures, or c) researching for the next photo-shoot opportunity – they don’t have the time to be sat around on Internet Forums talking about the latest and greatest MPix Sensor or senselessly debating Nikon v Canon.

Too many “photographers” get sucked into Internet Forums, reading countless comments on topics posted by total strangers. Before long they even start to believe some of the things that are written.

Don’t get me wrong, Forums “Can” be a useful source of information – but only if backed up by an alternative and reliable source of enquiry.

A huge problem with forums is the people who post the most shoot the least. These forums make it impossible to know the credentials of the posters. Worse still is that if another poster dares to differ with the opinion of the resident “forum expert” then that person is heckled and belittled and will usually not return, or at the very least will not offer an opinion in the future.

There is absolutely no substitute for picking up your camera and going out and shooting – change your settings, play around, look at what you get and learn from it. You will learn far more from actually using your camera (and reading the supplier provided manual) than you ever could by asking a faceless person on the internet.

Since January I have shot 48K images on my DSLRs, 3k on my X100 and countless images on my phone – I don’t have the time to read Internet Forums – even if I wanted to!

If you shoot as much as you can, and post process as much as you can, then you WILL learn why RAW is better than JPEG. You WILL learn to understand your Histogram and you WILL learn how to colour correct in Photoshop – and you will have done this through trial and error – but you will have learnt!

If on the other hand you spend most of your free time surfing Internet Forums asking questions then you “may” get to the same conclusion, but you will have wasted all that valuable time when you could have been out having fun taking pictures creating art and learning.

I know what I would prefer to be doing.

Best – Colin

iPhoneography

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Photography

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

App Store, Apple, camera, camera function, Digital single-lens reflex camera, film types, gadgets, glyn evans, Hipstamatic, iPhone, iPhoneography, mobile, Photograph, technology

Afternoon

iPhoneography – taking photos with your iPhone – right?

A brief history lesson first – back in November 2008 a fellow called Glyn Evans launched a Blog onto the unsuspecting world, called iPhoneography.com. Glyn’s Blog bought the phrase iPhoneography to the masses, more so because Apple has Patent rights on the term iPhone and to date have not pursued him for infringement – thus implying tacit approval.

iPhoneography has become very big business these days. With the explosion of the App store there are literally thousands of Apps for the iPhone and many are specifically related to the Camera function of the phone.

Like most people with an iPhone, I have downloaded my fair share of “Apps” for the camera, I have the usual HDR Apps & Camera Plus, along with the almost mandatory Instagram App, but yesterday I downloaded an App I had only been made aware of via an advert in an online magazine, and its called Hipstamatic.

Hipstamatic uses the iPhone’s camera function to enable you to shoot square photographs, to which it applies a number of software filters to make the images look as though they were taken with an antique film camera. You can then choose among a number of effects which are presented in the application as simulated lenses, films and flashes.

Its a pretty cool App to play with, you can change lenses and film types with just a swipe of your finger to give you hundreds of different possibilities when shooting – but does it cut the mustard?

One of the great things I learnt pretty quickly is that rather than having to change lenses and film types between shots (which could get very time consuming) you can enable a “shake to randomise” feature. Just shake your iPhone and you will get a random selection of lens and film type. I looked pretty daft shaking my phone vigorously every few minutes!!

Here are twenty of the best, different subjects, different lens/film combinations.

Would I recommend Hipstamatic? You bet

Would I have taken any of these photos if I had been using my DSLR? Nope

Is it art? I think so 🙂