Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

"Seven Miles High", enhanced with Photogene

Midwest Airlines #2306, August 18, 2009

I’m not a huge fan of wing shots — the novelty for me wore off about 12 years ago. But in August 2009, I was flying a Midwest Airlines E170 and looked out the window to see this wonderful convergence of wing, sky and cloud, contrast, shadow and saturation. I promise it’ll be another 12 years before I share another wing shot — unless it’s heavenly.

Unenhanced, shot with Camera Genius

Castle Rock, Colorado, July 2009.

As I stepped out of the car after a Saturday night in Denver, I saw the leaves from this tree catch the light from the streetlamp before fading into the dark night.

"The Toy Machine", unenhanced

Oneida Casino, Green Bay, Wisconsin, April 2009

I found this fascinating mix of content and color within a toy “claw” machine. Most of the toys are fairly standard. I find the black bear with the baby face a little disturbing and out of place.

"Chicago Athletic Association", 2MP image shot with Panasonic Lumix camera. Enhanced on iPhone with Camera Bag.

Chicago, 2002.

One of my favorite pictures. He was moving slowly down Michigan Avenue. I snatched the shot just as he was passing in front of the CAA. The original image is full of contrasts. It’s mostly monochrome, with the only real color being the plants in the windows and the color in his hood. I like the contrast of color and gray and of common passes by wealth on the streets of Chicago.

This one was taken long before my iPhone.

"St. Vince", unenhanced

Green Bay, Wisconsin, August 2009

The statue of Vince Lombardi in the front of Lambeau Field. I was moved by the light, shadow, reflection and lines when I saw this moment near sunset at Lambeau Field.

=M=

Welcome to my gallery and to how I see and capture the world.

I love LoFi photography. I have a nice Fuji digital SLR of my own and can use my girlfriend’s Canon Rebel XL any time I need to. I prefer to shoot LoFi. My iPhone is my favorite camera. For me, it provides enough image quality to capture the image, while introducing enough noise, texture, and digital “light leaks” to add presence to the image. I believe that this texture adds to the image much like film type and grain adds to an analog image.

I believe that these limitations make you compose the best possible image in camera, adding a set of criteria that are not present when shooting with a high end camera. There are great moments to capture and images everywhere. Basically, LoFi photography is making art out of snapshots.

I became fascinated with LoFi photography in 2005 and started using Motorola RAZR phone to capture “found images” I stumbled upon. The built-in camera was a very bad, very noisy VGA resolution camera that I thought produced a roughness and a texture that couldn’t be duplicated in any other camera or in Photoshop. I began to compose images for my camera phone, incorporating the limitations of the camera into the images. The RAZR gave my images a very noisy, cold, industrial feel that I felt could be achieved no other way. Ideally, I wanted the images enlarged to poster-size with no interpolation, noise, pixels and all — 640 by 480 big squares per oversized print.

Years later, I have my iPhone 2G. The camera in the iPhone is not great, but produces better images with greater contrast and color than my first digital camera, an old Panasonic Lumix 2MP camera. For me, there’s still enough noise to make the images interesting, but the quality of the images is exponentially better and produces much more usable results. I’ve added an arsenal of iPhone camera apps to either help me shoot the scenes that I see or to help me post-process my images to get what I want. All of the images you see on my blog are untouched by Photoshop and are shot, cropped, filtered and processed solely on my iPhone.

I really love the look of high end digital photography and commercially I wouldn’t shoot anything but. But I miss the imperfections of LoFi photography. I believe, however, that those wonderful surprises that the limitations of your equipment produce are far outweighed by the opportunity to capture in photography all the found moments that we all experience everyday.

I hope you enjoy my images. Thank you for visiting.

=M=

Zoom Lens

Zoom Lens
Version 1.0

Bottom Line: Essential!

Zoom Lens by BitWink finally brings a real digital zoom to the App Store. It provides up to an 8X digital zoom with no loss of image resolution.

I grabbed this app based on the query of a commenter in a recent post at iPhoneography.com. I was skeptical before I downloaded it. After all, the app store is filled with “digital zoom” apps which are really just in-app cropping.

Zoom Lens is the real deal. It does what it advertises and does it well.

You set the zoom level by pinching and scrolling onscreen. A double tap on the screen toggles between 4X zoom and no zoom — a nice touch. No matter what your zoom level, Zoom Lens actually resamples your images, sharpens them, and saves them at full resolution — 2MP or 3MP depending on your iPhone. The results are better than cropping and resampling in Photoshop. I’ve used several of the zoom apps and Zoom Lens produces the best results by far. Not only does it offer image interpolation, but its sharpening algorithm is very nice for a digital zoom. I’ve been using Snapture for over a year, another app with an image interpolated digital zoom feature, but it lacks the sharpening algorithm and that makes a difference.

I’ve only run comparison tests with both apps up to 4X — the max my caffeinated hands can handle. Zoom Lens produces superior results when compared to Snapture’s. It’s still a digital zoom and will not replace a real zoom lens, so don’t expect results that are on par with a good consumer camera or a high-end SLR. Also, remember that the higher the zoom level, the more your image will degrade — that’s true of any digital zoom. But based on my tests, Zoom Lens is the best digital zoom for iPhone that I’ve used so far. Definitely worth the money for this great camera add-on!

Zoom Lens is available in the App Store for $0.99 USD.

=M=

Camera XL — Megapixel Doubler
Version 1.0

Bottom Line: Recommend!

Camera XL – Megapixel Doubler by George Talusan is a new app for iPhone that promises to double the number of pixels in your iPhone images. Even among high end smart phones, the iPhone’s camera lags behind other smartphone cameras in its class. This app offers a workaround for one limitation of the iPhone. Using image upsampling or “rezzing up”, it doubles the resolution of your iPhone images. On the original iPhone and iPhone 3G, it takes the 2MP images and doubles them to 4MP; on the iPhone 3GS, it doubles the 3MP images to 6MP.

This is a good app to have and I recommend it. After kicking the tires for a couple of days, there are a lot of things I like about this app. Camera XL is yet another camera. You need to use its own built in camera to take advantage of the pixel doubling. Camera XL does NOT double the resolution of images that are either in your camera roll or in your iPhone image library. In fact, the app won’t even see any images in your photo albums –you can only open images from your camera roll.

It really does double the number of pixels in your image, although you’ll have to sync your iPhone to iPhoto or other desktop application to see the full-sized image. The upsampling algorithm is surprisingly good. The images I’ve shot don’t have any really glaring flaws. The images are comparable in image quality as resampling the image in Photoshop using Bicubic Smoother interpolation. The advantage to doing this in camera, though, is being able to do this on the fly and not having to lug around a laptop with Photoshop. Saving images takes quite a bit of time, so taking rapid fire shots isn’t an option with this app.

I like that there’s a setting to use the entire screen as a shutter release button. You can also email images from within the app. The resolution of the emailed images is greater than those emailed directly from the iPhone Photos app, but they’re not the full, upsampled resolution.

While Camera XL offers a bare-bones camera replacement, there are better camera replacements with many more features that I prefer to use. In future updates, I’d like to see the ability to rez up images that are already on my phone — including those in my iPhone photo albums — allowing me to use better camera apps and to apply filters or other image manipulation (like adjusting the color in the excellent apps Photogene or Photoforge for iPhone) before sizing the image up. While I realize that there’s a bit of image processing going on under the hood here, I’d still like to see image save times go a little faster. I’d like to be able to email the full-resolution images.

Image upsampling isn’t a replacement for having a better camera, but if the algorithm is good, it can sometimes yield acceptable results — I’ve used Genuine Fractals for Mac for years, often times with decent results. I was pleasantly surprised at the results I got from Camera XL. Hopefully, future updates will make Camera XL an indispensable tool for iPhone photographers. In a crowded field of iPhone apps, it is definitely a part of my iPhone camera bag.

Camera XL – Megapixel Doubler is available in the Apple App Store for $0.99. There is also a Camera XL Jr. version with ads (and a faint watermark) which you can try for free.

=M=