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

This is a call for entries! Life In LoFi has teamed with CanvasPop to present the “Shades of Summer” LoFi Photo Contest — Life In LoFi’s first photo contest. The contest runs now through June 29, 2011. We’ve got some great prizes we’ll be giving away. Click past the jump to find out all the details and how to enter.

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Pixels at an Exhibition
www.pixelsatanexhibition.com
through March 2010

PixelEx/Pixels at an Exhibition: Dada Left

As part of my Featured Photographer for March 2010, we’ve just posted more exclusive images at Pixels At An Exhibition. You can browse them all if you click here.

Much of it is photography of the street art in Deep Ellum — the area of Elm Street just east of downtown Dallas. Deep Ellum is a strip of three, maybe four streets of bars, restaurants, clubs, tattoo parlors, art galleries, vintage stores, old warehouses and lofts. Baylor Hospital where Mickey Mantle died is a couple of blocks away. Most of the buildings are old — old for Dallas, anyway. Many of them surviving gentrification since the 1920′s.

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Celebrating the creativity of iPhone users

iPhone Photography Awards is accepting submissions for their annual 2010 competition.

All photographers compete for the top award, the IPPA Photographer of the Year. Images will be reviewed on the basis of artistic merit, originality, subject, and style.

This year’s top prize is an 8GB iPod touch. The work of the top winner and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd Place Winners on each category will be publicized on IPPA online gallery and published in the IPPA Annual Winners Book, published at Blurb.

All 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners from each categories will receive an IPPA certificate. Judges will also award several Certificates of Honorable Mention to entries to acknowledge talent.

Copyright and all other rights remain that of the photographer. Any photograph used by IPPA shall carry the photographer’s credit line. Use may include publication in any IPPA media sponsor publication.

Entry fees range from $2.50 to $18.50 and are based on the number of images you submit at that time. Entry fees cover the cost of administration and promotion.

Deadline for submissions is March 31, 2010.

You can also view the 2008 and 2009 winning entries at www.ippawards.com.

Click here for more information or to submit entries.

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Sunlight Tracker

[UPDATE 11.01.10 11:00: For whatever reason, it looks like this app is not available in the App Store at this time and I'm unable to contact the developer. There are a couple of other sunlight trackers, including LightTrac for iPhone, LightTrac for iPad, Golden Hour and The Photographer's Ephemeris. There's a free version of Light Finder to try out, but to me, neither version looks particularly helpful. We'll keep you updated on the status of Sunlight Tracker. =M=]

We just ran across this in the U.S. App Store. Sunlight Tracker by RLSP is a new app which displays a whole bunch of information about the sun, allowing you to plan your photo shoot around your light. This is similar to what BlueHour and CityTime do, except Sunlight Tracker seems to provide a lot more information geared specifically towards photographers.

Sunlight Tracker is free in the U.S. App Store for a limited time.

It features sunrise and sunset times, twilight times which are good for shooting in the Blue hours, angle and elevation of the sun and other information. Although we just grabbed it and haven’t tested it yet, it looks really comprehensive and if you find yourself planning around the good light, this is an excellent opportunity to grab this utility while it’s free!

Detailed information on the app’s features and functions can be found on the RLSP website.

App Store link: Sunlight Tracker

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Update Saturday, March 13, 2010. Well, that didn’t last long…. Looks like the limited time has passed. The app is now available for its regular price of $1.99 USD. Still, give it a look if you think you might need a sunlight tracker. For the extra dollar, this app does a lot more than give sunrise/sunset times.

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Related links: BlueHour review | CityTime – World Time – Code City

EYE’EM CALLING FOR ENTRIES NOW!

EYE’EM has announced a call for entries for the EYE’EM Mobile Photography Award 2010. Entries from any mobile device are accepted, not just iPhones. Also, you are permitted to use desktop apps such as Photoshop to retouch your images.

Sion Fullana is judging this year’s EYE’EM Award. Sion is a professional photographer, journalist and filmmaker living in New York City. He has been featured in photography blogs and magazines, such as Time Out NY, Photocritic.org, American Photo Magazine and Wink-Magazine. In a very short period of time, he has become a celebrated pioneer in cellphone photography, using his 3G iPhone and experimenting with a select group of iPhone photo apps. He is one of iPhoneography’s most recognized members.

More information and links follow the jump. >>>

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In case you missed this, here’s a cool link from Michael Zelbel at Smoking Strobes.com. It’s his method of organizing images on his computer. He and I have similar issues with our photography — we both take a lot of shots, we both work with multiple or subsequent copies of our production files, and we both don’t want to take much time or thought in organizing our images so they’re quick and easy to find.

I don’t use iPhoto to organize my raw iPhoneography. I prefer to work with my images directly on my Mac. I only add my finished, processed images to my iPhoto. Rarely will I add a raw or production image to iPhoto.

Using a consistent folder hierarchy to organize your images helps to cut down the clutter of your raw images and safety shots, as well as keeping your finished files organized and easy to find. Michael’s hierarchy may be a bit much for iPhoneography, especially since most of us process images before they leave the iPhone, but you can modify his approach to fit your workflow.

In forums I frequently got advice that I should absolutely use this or that photo database or this or that professional software to organize my thousands of files. Believe me dude, I’ve been there, done that. What works best for me is a set of folders that gives me no headaches, no technical glinches and which allows me to spend more time behind the camera than in front of the screen.

Read the entire post at SmokingStrobes.com >>>

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Related links: Smoking Strobes

Since the birth of my FROM THE POCKET project in late 2009, I have received several emails from fellow iPhoneographers — many of whom want to know the applications I use for processing, capturing techniques, subject choices, and so on. As we all know, iPhoneography is a rapidly growing artistic medium and with that, comes the introduction of new artists and iPhoneographers alike. The art and design world is slow to accept iPhoneography as a true expression of art. However, we are seeing that iPhoneographers who are true artists beginning to alter this interpretation. Just like any new form of art, iPhoneography needs to grow and establish artistic legitimacy. There are those who simply take pictures with their iPhone, and those who employ the iPhone as an artistic tool.

This article is directed at my fellow and aspiring iPhoneographers who want to better their iPhoneography experience and artfully improve their images. Below, I have listed 7 simple tips to better your iPhoneography. This will not be a source of suggesting applications you should be using to process images, or how you should hold the iPhone, or how to make your images look “more analog”. My intentions are to provide artful insight into bettering your iPhoneography.

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I didn’t create these. The bakery artisans at Central Market in Fort Worth did. They really are artists and dessert is their palette. Other than the wine department and the cheese section (Central Market is the only place you can get fresh cheese curds in DFW), the Dessert Department is my favorite in the market. Okay, really it’s called the bakery, but that’s what they the place where they make the bread. The Dessert Department is where dreams lined with tiny cream puffs are made.

My dream is to someday walk into Central Market’s bakery and say “I’ll take them all.”

Just Desserts

Toolbox: TiltShift Generator

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Editor’s Note: 2010 is starting off as a great year for exhibitions of iPhone photography. Another interesting showing is the 1 is enough Exhibition, presented by iPhography.com, Taky Magazine and the 1k x 1k Gallery.

The selected images will be shown in print and galleries in several countries spanning the globe. The exhibit will also be featured in the French culture magazine Taky. There’s great exposure for the artist and this exhibition certainly has a lot of reach and clout to expand the audience of the photography shot with iPhones.

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The iPhone’s camera has a 0.2 second fixed shutter speed and a fixed aperture of f/2.8. It adjusts for exposure by adjusting the sensitivity of the sensor inside the camera — in effect, adjusting the ISO. This means that the darker your photograph, the greater the chance there will be noise in the image.

You can improve the color and clarity, as well as reduce the noise in your iPhone images by making sure, whenever possible, that you have a strong light source that’s behind you. For example, when taking outdoor photographs, try shooting with the sun at your back whenever you can. Lighting your subject properly will help you get good color, good contrast and reduced noise from your iPhone photos.

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