Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

ClassicPan — Vintage Panoramic Camera
Version 1.0.1

The Bottom Line: Good potential for novel photos, but version 1.0 needs some fixes.

ClassicPan

I like shooting landscape images and I like shooting with a wide aspect ratio. To me, a good panorama is a single frame right out of life’s big movie. Camera HD, a straightforward yet versatile aspect ratio app, landed on my main camera page the day it was released and has stayed there ever since.

ClassicPan is a vintage-style panoramic camera app from misskiwi. While the iPhone’s camera normally shoots photos with a 4:3 aspect ratio, ClassicPan stores images to your camera roll in 9:4 panorama format. Like Camera HD, this is achieved by cropping the top and bottom of the frame, resulting in a “fixed lens” type of pano without any of the wide-angle distortion.

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This updated Camera Bag post will also go in the navbar above. I wanted to share the evolution of my iPhone. You can read my original Camera Bag post here.

Some of my other camera apps. Page 4 on my iPhone

The best camera is the one that’s with you and the one that’s with me nearly all the time is my first generation 8 GB iPhone 2G.

I don’t use one app exclusively to shoot with. I have several and try to match up the image with the app. One of the features that makes the iPhone camera unique is the availability of thousands of photography-related apps. For less than the cost of a DVD, you can basically get a whole new camera experience.

iPhone apps are constantly being created, updated and improved. Since I first wrote my original Camera Bag post, several new apps have been released and several apps have been improved to the point where they have leapfrogged ahead as far as functionality and performance.

I find myself shooting with many different apps than the first time I wrote about my iPhone’s camera bag. Here’s my updated toolbox — the go-to apps I’m currently using.

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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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Camera HD

Camera HD – Widescreen Photos
Version 1.0

Bottom Line: Recommend!

Camera HD – Widescreen Photos is another excellent app from developer George Talusan. Like his other apps, it brings unique functionality to the iPhone. All this app does is crop your image to one of many selectable, preset aspect ratios, and does so quickly and easily. In the prefs, you select from 20 different aspect ratios, including 16:9 Widescreen HD, 1.85:1 American Theater, and 2.59:1 Cinerama. It’s actually been released for a while, but with the many other apps that have been released, good and bad, I think this one has fallen under the radar. This is a worthy app that deserves a second look.
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October 22, 2009

Late night last night, a found image….

Faces in a Crowd

Shot with Camera HD, processed with Photogene

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"Fixture"

Shot with Camera HD, processed with Photogene

"Otis"

Shot with Camera Genius, modified with PhotoForge (including some image cloning. Cool!)

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We saw U2 last night at Cowboy Stadium in Arlington, Texas. I highly recommend seeing U2 on this tour or at least sometime in your life — they don’t disappoint. I highly recommend you avoid seeing concerts at Cowboy Stadium. There are too many people in the room, the sight lines can be bad, and the acoustics are terrible.

We didn’t get any good photography at U2. We got memory shots — mementos of our little, unique piece of the show and our space in the crowd.

After the show, the night and the fog were gorgeous. I grabbed these on the way home.

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"The Fountain"

Shot with Camera HD, unmodified

"Light and Fog"

Shot with Camera Genius, modifed with PS Mobile

October 2-5, 2009

In Seattle, some of the things I saw, while gorgeous in their color and saturation, took on an entirely different feeling once that element was stripped out and the images were reduced to their essentials in black and white. “Barstools…” evokes a much grittier feeling when the color is stripped away. It has a feeling of the smoky, dusty early 60′s dive bars. The Photobooth against the cinderblock stands as a timeless monument in an empty amusement park. The natural contrast between the brightly lit Space Needle and the darkness of the night sky plays off each other well in color or black and white.

"Barstools in Monochrome"

Shot with Camera HD, modified with Photogene and CameraBag

"Photobooth"

Shot with ProCamera, modified with Photogene and CameraBag

"Space Needle"

Shot with ProCamera, modified with CameraBag

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