Life in LoFi: iPhoneography | iPhone Photo News, Showcases, App Reviews

iPhone photography has now become prominent enough in the zeitgeist that there have now been several studies done on its various aspects. For instance, last year, I, along with P1xels’ Knox Bronson and other iPhoneographers, participated in a general study on the community and social aspects of iPhoneography.

This year, a new dissertation by Zachary McCune, a Master’s student in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, analyzes three months of research just completed on Instagram Users and their motivations to take and share photos on the iPhone platform.

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Instagram is currently the standard for social photo sharing apps on the iPhone. It wasn’t the first, but something about the app caught on. Since its meteoric rise, there have been a ton of other social photo apps — picplz, Burstn, Path, and most infamously Colorâ„¢ –  that have tried to unseat Instagram as the top iPhone’s top social photo app. While some may have a better feature set, none have come close to gathering the five million users (and growing rapidly) that the Instagram network has.

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We cover photography basics often here. Although I believe that the iPhone is a special camera because of the number of post-processing apps available for it, it’s still a camera. In order to get the best possible photographs, you need to start with the best possible capture.

In case you missed it a while ago, Amy-Mae Elliott wrote a great piece on Mashable covering photography basics as they relate to smartphones — all of them, not just the iPhone. If you’re new to mobile phone photography, it’s got good tips to help capture better photos in-camera. If you’ve been shooting a while, it’s a good refresher read.

In most cases, the phone has become our primary camera, but despite tech developments that can see high-end options, most of us have 5-megapixel or less snappers with limited functionality. But this doesn’t mean you can’t take great photos — it just means you have to be smart about getting the right shot.

Click here to read all of “How To Master Smartphone Photography” on Mashable.

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If I took a LoFi poll right now asking if readers fully read the Terms of Service when joining any type of photo social website or service, I’d bet good money that it would skew somewhere around 90% = No. We all do it… just scroll to the bottom and hit “Agree” without reading them. Reading Term of Service is a great sedative. I can last nearly two pages with some of the really engaging stuff, and that’s only because I took a year of Legalese in college.

But as creatives and photographers, what legal rights are we clicking away when we blindly accept terms of service? At what point do we lose control over our creations? Glenn Fleishman over at boingboing recently posted an excellent story that analyzes and digests the copyright sections of Terms of Service of many of the major photo sharing services.

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If you’re an Instagrammer and also love analytics as much as I do, Statigram is a very cool site to check out. Statigram provides metrics for your Instagram account, including your Top 5 most liked and followed photos, how often you use filters and which are your favorites, and your most engaged followers.

If you’re really into Instagram, this is a cool and powerful tool.

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Here’s a cool link that’s full of geek and bound to make your brain hurt. A post on EOSHD from last year talks about next generation mobile phone camera lenses by Sony and Omnivision, the current manufacturer of the iPhone’s cameras. With all of the recent talk about who will be manufacturing the camera in the “iPhone 5″, I thought it would be a good time to trot this post out again.

The article describes recent patents for two different technology goes that will greatly improve the experience of shooting with a mobile phone camera, including the iPhone.

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Many iPhoneographers are creating works that when viewed by the public, the response is often “I can’t believe this was done on a iPhone.” I have been witness to this reaction many times, as I’m sure many of you have as well.

iPhoneography is now finding its way into more mainstream photographic publications. A recent issue of Square Magazine, the French/English square frame format magazine has excellent showcases from Clay Lipsky, Quinn Jacobson, Stephen Gill and others. Also featured in Square Magazine 2.1 is Amo Passicos… Miss Amo and Her iPhone.

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It seems like Instagram sites on the web come and go as quickly as you can say “Instagram.” For a while, Instagram were cracking down on unauthorized use of their feed or changing how their feed works, making it difficult for many of these sites to keep up. With the recent release of the new Instagram public API, hopefully, we’ll see some stability and longevity in these third party websites.

Shane Rich over at HatchCraft has written a great post of the five of the the top Instagram web sites. HatchCraft has some good Instagram creds. They’re the company that builds the great-looking Boo Box — handmade bamboo shadow box frames and prints for people’s iPhonegraphy.

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Image Copyright ©Stephanie C. Roberts

iPhoneographer Stephanie Roberts has been extremely busy recently. Her new book, The Art of iPhoneography was released recently and is getting excellent peer reviews on Amazon.com. Fellow iPhoneographer Dixon Hamby says “This is a very good book. The Art of iPhoneography does have some “technical” info in the book like iPhone basics and how to use several apps, but the heart of the book is how to see and find your own voice.”

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Photo courtesy of MacTrast

Ahh, Spring. Time for renewal, allergies, baseball and iPhone rumors.

Recently, the interwebs have been buzzing (a little, anyway) about a comments made by Sony CEO Howard Stringer stating that Sony will be supplying the 8 MP cameras for the next generation of iPhone. I recently posted about it here. I still don’t think it’ll be called the iPhone 5, but for consistency’s sake I’ll call it that here.

Over on MacTrast, Frank Prendergast has written an excellent post “iPhone 5 – 8 megapixel camera a step backwards?“  comparing the current iPhone 4 5 MP camera by OmniVision to the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc mobile phone camera.

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