Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

On Twitter today, it’s #Follow Friday. Life In LoFi is also on Facebook and Twitter. Please follow us on both social networks.

Many of our contests and promo codes are given away on our Facebook fan page . There, we also post breaking iPhone photo news and announcements of free apps that don’t make it into the blog. And I promise we don’t update nearly as often as Mashable does….

On our Twitter feed , we post breaking announcements of new blog posts, app sales and freebies, news, retweets of awesome iPhoneography and the occasional very candid musings about apps that we don’t (or won’t) cover on the blog.

Here are the links to both pages:

Facebook/LifeInLoFi

Twitter/@lifeinlofiblog

Thanks for reading and following!

=M=

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I was asked to post this email from Brad Malcolm, the President of Athentech, the developers of Perfectly Clear. I have posted it in its entirety, but first, I wanted to weigh in with my thoughts on this update.

Perfectly Clear has been one of my primary go-to apps for a while. It’s one of the apps that I recommend most to new iPhoneographers. It’s an essential app for the early iPhone 2G and 3G models and I still use it to improve images on my iPhone 4.

Read the rest of this entry →

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[UPDATED 8/27/10 4:19 PM]

Nearly everyone with an iPhone has used the camera to take snapshots — pictures of family, friends and moments to capture and share. Far fewer — but a growing and diverse number — have created art  for show, gallery or exhibition. But how many would consider using an iPhone for commercial work? How many of you already have?

Read the rest of this entry →

Here are some random additional thoughts I had for my earlier post on printing and enlarging iPhone photos. They didn’t seem to fit smoothly in context in the earlier post, so here they all get their own bullet points in a random musing.

• Read the rest of this entry →

I just got back from Dayton, Ohio last night, where I’ve been since Thursday. We had a great time in Dayton. It’s a fun city and there are a lot of friendly people there. I’d go back in a heartbeat!

Because of the Dayton Air Show and a couple of great trips to the National Air Force Museum, I hadn’t had the time to blog like I’d wanted. Those of you who follow my personal Twitter account, @MartyNearDFW, know that I’m a huge aircraft geek and Dayton this weekend was full of really cool stuff for flight lovers. I got to sit on the flight deck of a 757, wave from the top of the air stair from SAM 26000 (it was only called Air Force One when the President was aboard), and get some really cool photos — both aviation-related and non. I’ll be posting a really cool photo I shot from the interior of an American Airlines DC-3 soon.

Today, I need to get caught up on some day-job deadlines but will have time to post some musings, reviews, and photos soon. Thank you for reading!

=M=

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Hey, iPhoneographers in Dayton, Ohio! Here’s a heads up….

I’ll be in Dayton this weekend at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base shooting my first military air show with military aircraft photographer Thomas Moore. With my 2G and my 4, I also plan to roam Dayton shooting random buildings, warehouses, theaters and whatever else catches my eye this weekend. We’ll be in town Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

If there are any iPhoneographers in or near Dayton this weekend who would like to meet up to photograph around town or just meet, hang out, swap stories, recipes and share apps, email me here and let’s make some arrangements to meet. It’s always great to meet fellow iPhoneographers.

I don’t come bearing gifts or freebies, but I have been known to buy a round or two.

I hope to see you this weekend!

=M=

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More random thoughts and a short review. Not enough for full blog posts, but each warrants some level of discussion. A Friday edition of Musings….

• The one app that has been most indispensable to me during the iPhone 4 testing I’ve done is PhotoSize by Danny Goodman. It does one thing — it quickly and easily displays the pixel dimensions of any image in your iPhone’s photo library. This is very useful to keep tabs on how large (or small) apps are saving your images. This is also one of the first apps I use to check images from a new app, especially when the developer doesn’t state output resolutions in their App Store descriptions. It’s a free download and if you’ve got the screen space, I highly recommend this utility.
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  App Store link: PhotoSize

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• iPhone 4 is now 2 weeks old. iOS 4 is a few days older. I’m looking through LoFi’s iPhone 4 Compatibility List and I’m still amazed at the number of camera and photo apps that are still not iPhone 4 (and iOS 4) compatible. I’m even more amazed at how slowly some updates are being released to the App Store. Hipstamatic was in review for over a week.

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=M=

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Some random thoughts and a short review. Not enough for full blog posts, but each warrants some level of discussion. A Thursday edition of Musings….

• I love my new iPhone 4. Its greatness transcends the cellphone suck that is AT&T in my neighborhood (making calls downstairs is an exercise in dropped calls — more bars in more places, except my house). I’ve had it almost one week and I’ve made phone calls, run apps, edited images, tested a lot of apps, checked in on Foursquare, downloaded data. All throughout, the new phone has shined. The only thing I really haven’t done yet is to go on a shoot with my new camera. I’ve taken snapshots… and they’re gorgeous. I want to see what this phone has behind the lens. I really want to take Four out for a shoot.
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  ColorShadow screenshot

  ColorShadow [App Store link] by Hokuson is a pretty cool app. Colorshadow is an app that does variations of one effect, but does it very well. Basically, it converts your image to a stark monochrome and then layers a color gradient over the parts of the image that aren’t white. Because of the stark contrast, it works best when your source image has a simple background that contrasts from the subject. The effects are retro in an early ’70′s Ironside or a ’90′s original iPod commercial kind of way. It’s not a camera — doesn’t even give you the option. It loads images from your camera roll and saves them out at up to your iPhone’s full resolution (including 5MP on the iPhone 4) or a smaller webready size — nice! It’s really easy to use. The effect is very retro and kinda funky. ColorShadow is a good app. I like it. It’s $1.99 in the App Store.
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• If you upgraded your iPhone this time, what do you plan to do with your old iPhone? I’m keeping mine as a spare camera…. I’m keeping my old 2G for those times when I want to shoot digital lofi, not app lofi into my images. The new iPhone 4 camera is really nice. It has excellent clarity, fantastic color and saturation, and a lot less noise than the older cameras. It improves on all the image qualities that made the older iPhones unique — the noise, the color, the overall tint and saturation. The new iPhone 4 is almost a real camera. Its pictures are bright and crisp without needing to run them through a DRC app first. The old iPhone 2G and 3G are true digital “toy” cameras. As mobile phone cameras improve, I suspect that the old iPhones’ value as digital toy cameras — both monetarily and from a iPhoneography standpoint — will only increase and become sought after.
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=M=

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