Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

December 29, 2009
Fort Worth, Texas

"Isham Cemetery with a Dusting of Snow"

Toolbox: AutoStitch, AutoAdjust, MonoPhix

Ten minutes from downtown sits our neighborhood on the east side of Fort Worth. It’s one of the areas of the DFW Metroplex that still has a somewhat rural feel. On the weekends, you often see people riding their horses down the medians on John T. White Road. When I first moved to this area back in the mid-1990′s, it was still a mail rural route.

There’s an old cemetery across from a woodframe church near some new housing subdivisions. I’ve only seen evidence of one funeral there in the years I’ve lived here.

Today, we had our third snow of the season — freakishly winter-like for an area that should be sunny and in the 60′s this time of year. Driving past old Isham Cemetery, the gray sky and the light dusting of the snow over the open field of the old cemetery made it feel like winter.

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Here’s an interesting project from photographer Kevin Bauman. It wasn’t photographed with an iPhone, but it’s a very interesting collection of photography from a city that I became fascinated with over ten years ago. The project is called “100 Abandoned Houses” and viewed as whole, I think it’s a stunning, personal photojournal of the decline of one of the U.S.’ great cities.

Ten years ago, I flew to Detroit to catch one of the last baseball games at Tiger Stadium. My friend was a great hostess and drove me around the city, where I saw hundreds of beautiful old buildings mostly abandoned. I could imagine many of these houses were striking in their day. Restored, they’d be mansions here.

As we drove around these old, former neighborhoods, I couldn’t help but think that parts of Detroit were a city in ruins. My friend, Kelly, told me that the backlog for the city to demolish these old buildings was 20 years.

Built with auto industry money, most of these beautiful old houses are now beyond repair.

I like Kevin Bauman’s style of shooting these old houses. His framing is simple and consistent. Every shot is a full-frontal. When viewed as a whole, to me it’s an impressive piece of work.

Click here to see 100 Abandoned Houses.

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December 23, 2009
Dallas, Texas

"the bar"

Toolbox: TiltShift Generator, PhotoGene

There are nights when these are my two favorite words.

This particular bar is located in the lobby of the Magnolia Theatre in Dallas. The bartenders are always friendly. Instead of sports, there are always classic films on the video screens. Couples sit at the bar or in one of the few booths. On a good night, you may find yourself drawn into a conversation about classic or indie film with people you’d never met before.

It’s a good evening.

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"The Magnolia"

CameraKit

CameraKit by Tetsuya Chiba is on sale for $0.99 USD for a limited time — that’s 50% off. Even at its regular price, this is a worthwhile purchase.

CameraKit is a camera and post-processing app that acts almost as a digital darkroom on your iPhone. You can load images from your iPhone’s entire photo library, which is how I use it. None of its features are unique, but here they are nicely packaged, well implemented, simple to use, and make it easy to experiment.

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AutoStitch

AutoStitch Panorama by Cloudburst Research has been updated to version 2.0. I really thought the last version, 1.1.2 was great and the new version brings speed improvements, high-resolution stitching and high resolution preview/cropping.

AutoStitch combines from 2 to 20 or more images and can create seamless (or nearly seamless) panoramas on your iPhone. This is cool in itself, especially for getting the really big shots.

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UPDATE 12/30/09: In the new 1.31.3 update, images that are processed in-camera are saved in full resolution, 1600×1200 on my 2G.

Also, in the new update, the built-in hook to the image-enhancement website, 9Monkeys.net, now works seamlessly and quickly within the app.

Kudos to the app’s developer Carl Im at 9Monkeys, who has always been very responsive when I’ve brought up issues from the perspective of an end user.

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SmartCam

SmartCam
Version 1.15.3

Bottom Line: A little pricey, but good exposure enhancement for your existing underexposed images

SmartCam from 9Monkeys Ltd. is a camera, exposure enhancement, and portal to an online image adjusting website. It’s an overlooked app that hasn’t really found its audience in the App Store yet. At $2.99 USD, it’s a little more expensive than most apps in this category which typically run about a buck. How does it fare and is it worth the premium? It depends on how you use the app.

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Arlington, Texas
December 23, 2009

Every now and then I’m reminded of some of the truly amazing things that the iPhone camera can do. One of those things is capturing great color at the most surprising of times. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well my 2G preserved the color of these vibrant flowers. The only color moves made to this image were those that TiltShift Generator does by default.

Stunning.

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"Orchids"

Toolbox: TiltShift Generator

For those of you who follow both Glyn Evans’ iPhoneography blog and Life in LoFi, you may have noticed we have begun to cross post some of our articles. Glyn contacted me a few weeks ago asking if he could post some of my reviews, and I gladly agreed.

It was suggested that we share information and reviews and I gladly accepted. Glyn and I found that many times we were reviewing the same apps and usually arriving at the same conclusions. Since we’re both one-man operations, the sharing of resources benefits both blogs, also allowing us both to more easily share our thoughts about any given app. The end result is that both websites will benefit from a greater number of full app reviews.

In addition to daily notifications on new iPhone apps, iPhoneography.com regularly showcases a lot of great iPhoneographers — something we don’t do here. In addition to reviews, Life In LoFi features articles on technique and my random musings, as well as cool links that I run across when avoiding work at the day job….

We’re both serving a great community of serious and casual iPhoneographers. From time to time, you’ll be seeing posts from both Glyn and myself. We feel — and hopefully you will, too — that this will benefit the readers of both sites, allowing Glyn and I the ability to free up time and resources to pursue additional stories, as well as the ability to offer more insightful commentary.

As always, thank you for stopping by!

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