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

The 2010 holiday shopping season is officially upon us. Cyber Monday — the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S. — has become the biggest online shopping day worldwide. I suspect it has a lot to do with a) there is nothing worth getting up at 4:00 am to wait in line in the cold for on Black Friday, and b) after a four-day weekend, it’s really, really, really hard to get back in that work groove. Honestly, I can only hit refresh on Facebook for so many hours before I’ve got to do something else.

Life In LoFi has put together this shopping guide/wish list for iPhoneographers. There’s a broad range of gift ideas here. Practical items to help improve your iPhoneography. Cool, geeky gadgets that are just great to have. A few fun, non-iPhoneography related items that appeal to your inner Apple fanboy.

Click past the jump to marvel at all the toys. >>>

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Although the iPhone 4 camera’s full resolution is 2592x1936px, there are still quite a few apps which are unable to take advantage of the camera’s full 5MP resolution.

There are still a lot of apps that only support up to 2MP or 1600x1200px resolution. Saving full-res iPhone 4 images down to 2MP with these apps often results in an image size of 1600×1196 or 1195 pixels. What happens to the missing 4-5 pixels? It’s actually not a bug in the OS or in the apps themselves.

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Leica M8 back for iPhone 4 case. Photo credit: BeyondtheTech

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While the rest of us are waiting patiently for our free iPhone 4 cases from Apple, Life In LoFi reader Gary Moyer turned me onto his cool new iPhone 4 case — one that looks like a Leica M8 camera.

How to create your own mock Leicaphone after the jump. >>>

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You Gotta See This!
Version 1.0
Price: $1.99

Bottom Line: An easy, fun app that replicates the panoramic collage style of photography. A few frustrating bugs in the initial release drop it down a star.

You Gotta See This is a new panography or panoramic collage from Boinx Software. Panography is different than panorama in that images are very visibly tiled to create a collage. David Hockney is an artist who uses this style of photography in his works. You Gotta See This! is an easy, fun app that replicates this style of photography.

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iPhone 4, Camera

Bottom Line: Great color, great saturation, great dynamic range, a decent flash. An awesome mobile phone camera in many ways, but a few first edition flaws.

I’ve had my iPhone 4 for two weeks now. It’s an amazing device and I absolutely love it. It’s nearly as much an improvement over my old iPhone 2G as the 2G was an improvement over my old Motorola RAZR. It’s faster. The new retina display is gorgeous. iOS 4 is a terrific operating system; it runs great on the iPhone 4 and isn’t plagued by the performance issues and slowdowns that many users are experiencing with older iPhones. The battery life is improved over previous iPhones. Even taking into consideration that this is a brand new unit, I often go two days without charging.

The iPhone 4 also has a much-touted, much improved camera. It’s like going from your first, old 2MP digital camera years ago and upgrading to a new PowerShot. The new features and specs take what was once a class of digital lo-fi cameras (the iPhone) and gotten very close to a respectable point-and-shoot camera. You won’t be ditching your DSLR for an iPhone 4 any time soon, but you may be leaving the house a lot more without your PowerShot.

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Not everyone is having this problem with their new iPhones, but if you’re experiencing the yellow cast issue some iPhone 4 owners are having with their camera in certain low-light situations (I am one of those experiencing this problem on my iPhone), a quick and easy fix may already be in your toolbox….

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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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If you’ve upgraded from a previous iPhone to the iPhone 4, in addition to the many new features and updates of the new camera, you may have noticed a slightly larger field of view (FOV) with the iPhone 4. This means the iPhone 4 is capable of wide angle shots that are just a little bit, well… wider.

We compare the old and the new FOV on the iPhone camera after the jump. >>>

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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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June 30, 2010 — Just two big photo app updates today. The TiltShift Generator update has some nice iPhone 4 compatibility. Picture Show got a ton of new filters, an enhanced GUI, some iOS 4 bug fixes, but it’s still 2MP output.

Yesterday, CameraKit was updated to version 1.9 and now takes advantage of full iPhone 4 resolutions.

Updates for the Classic Camera series from misskiwi have been submitted to the App Store, but haven’t been released yet. And the Hipstamatic 160 update that adds new features and fixes the issue with the monochrome films was submitted on Monday, but we didn’t see that one today either.

We’ve added several other apps to the list as well, including the new app colorShadow.

Go to Life In LoFi’s iPhone 4 Photo App Compatibility Page to see our entire list of photo apps and how well they work on the iPhone 4.

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