Three images of Boscastle, Cornwall taken with an iPhone.

When vertical becomes horizontal

Not long back I visited the Lake District, Wast Water to be specific, and wrote a weblog concerning photographing the place with nothing but an iPhone and an App called Pano. I’ve been on my travels again and discovered that Pano also works when you turn it 90° and create vertical panoramic images see above.

Pano stitches images you take with it on the fly merging them into one long photo. If you ignore the landscape mode warning and turn the camera there’s no reason that verticle images can be made instead on horizontal. Why would you want to do that? Well, for aethetic reasons some people may like the long thin image ratio as opposed to short and fat but you may also prefer this method for exposure reasons.

The exposure reasoning

With the above images typically four photos are shot and merged together. Each image is exposed by the camera using it’s automatic and none flexible exposure system, and for once this is a bonus. Essentially the iPhone tries to give a correct exposure for what hits the sensor, normally that means an average reading where skies often burn out and foregrounds are too dark. Too understand this try moving your phone around a scene and you’ll see the camera correcting itself as the light intensity changes. Now if you can organise your picture into areas or zones of similar exposures you can render the images or paint the picture a zone at a time. This is pretty easy to do vertically with foreground, middle-ground and sky. Dark foreground is thus rendered correctly exposed and hot sky turn from white to deep blue with clouds. Pano does the rest when it merges them together. Fundamentally we are producing a HDR picture without the faffing in Photoshop with multiple exposures. It takes a bit of trial and error to get it right, if you think of it as a kind of automatic zone system for the cameraphone age you’ll not go far wrong.

It’s definitely something I’ll be trying more often from now on and I encourage other people to have a go and let me know how you get on.

Links

• More of my Boscastle pictures on Flickr

I find the iPhone good for abstract snaps

Recently I have been using my phone as a kind of electronic sketchbook. When I find myself queuing, waiting, standing around or generally not engaged in meaningful activity, like a flasher, I whip it out and make an exposure. The iPhone, whilst being a bit cumbersome to handle, and not very useful in low light, is often the best equipment for the job because it’s the only one I have with me (I still sound like a flasher!). I have found myself taking images that I just wouldn’t with my SLR and 3 bags worth of equipment I tend to lug around with me. Perhaps because it’s less obtrusive and less like a camera and I find myself thinking differently when using it. Hey, those old Apple “Think Different” [sic] ly, adverts have worked on a subconscious level if not a grammatical one.

After the picture has been taken comes the bit I really like. With the use of a few free or very cheap apps I can crop, add filters and borders and upload to the internet, it’s all pretty instant and makes me wonder why I spend so much time in front of Photoshop. I have to recommend tumblr.com as an elegantly designed site I’ve started to use to display just my iPhone pics.

The apps I use are:

• The Best Camera by Übermind £1.79
• Pixelpipe by Pixelpipe inc Free
• Tumblr free micro blogging but more beautiful than twitter

For those interested the above pictures were taken whist waiting at Foxton Locks, a bathroom floor, a hotel carpet during conference, a nightclub entrance hall, a heavy metal gig and Art Gallery entrance.

links:

• you can follow my iPhone photos here on tumblr
• more traditional iPhone pictures in the Lake District

Flying hearts from flying Vs and Mirrorball

A couple of photos from last night’s gig where I was trying to find something that was a more soul than heavy metal.

For the first time in a long while I was persuaded to attended a gig, Mastodon at Nottingham’s Rock City. Many years ago I used to live at Rock City sometimes attending rock, alternative and student nights in the same week, so it was nostalgic to visit again.

Rock City is the venue where I first saw Guns ‘n’ Roses, Iggy Pop, Public Enemy, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Jane’s Addiction, amongst others, so I have fond memories. The place did seem a lot smaller than I remembered and they’ve given it a bit of a facelift, not much, a lick of paint here and there but not enough to change the atmosphere which was always pretty good. The carpet may have had a clean, one would hope, but I didn’t check closely it just seemed less sticky, those of you that have ever sat on the carpet will understand that comment. The most bizarre addition, apart from the guy in the toilets selling aftershave (a hard sell when all punters have beards), was the Mock Tudor balcony adornment made of steel plate, very metal. But the overwhelming difference was the number of gadgets and personal technology people were using to text, tweet and take pictures. It seems that since my last gig we don’t experience a concert we record it and collectively file it in the cloud I found at least one Flickr set of the same concert taken with the ubiquitous iPhone this morning. I offer my two iPhone images to the mass that were taken on the night above and maybe I’ll go to another gig before the next leap in technology happens.

Links:

• Rock City on Wikipedia
• A history of Rock City
• Mastodon, the band not the dinosaur

Free lighting provided by the sun, for everything else there's Mastercard

Equipment used

A high key light (Sun), reflector (table) and dark backdrop (fence). You don’t need fancy equipment and studios, just a keen eye on the weather and an understanding of the available light. Taken in the early afternoon, the sun is quite high and back left. The table here is acting as a reflector and bouncing the sun back up into her face and filling in the shadows. Behind is a fence which has been dropped into deep shadow by the position of the sun.

About the image

I like the way the cat and the girl merge together. They are best friends in real life and often this close, so I might have yelled “hold it there”, but apart from that there was no instructions given or posing required.

Superstar DJ Advert

Hang the DJ (out the way in a cupboard somewhere)

I found this press advert from way back when the college was offering BTEC courses in DJ Technology. Alas, the course isn’t offered anymore. I don’t know how much its demise has to do with Apple’s iPod, which at about this time was just about to go stratospheric sales-wise. Do people need to learn to DJ anymore? Surely we can all do it with a well crafted iTunes playlist plugged into a PA. I still have my LPs; they’re hidden in boxes in the loft, soon to be joined by my CDs which still reside, in plain view on shelves, in the living room but I think their fate is sealed, as I no longer have a CD player and every song I have is now on the computer.

DJ Hero?

Things do have a habit of coming full circle and I think there may be hope for budding DJs out there; it’s name is DJ Hero. I saw an hilarious advert for this on TV the other day, starring Jay-Z and Eminem (technically both MCs not DJs, but I guess Terminator X won’t shift as many units). Now Guitar Hero I can understand; technology’s answer to shuffling about with a badminton racket pretending to be Angus Young, but DJ Hero? Who ever said? “When I grow up I want to be a DJ just like that fella on Top of the Pops – at the back, in an oversized coat, behind the keyboards, next to amps, with the headphones, fiddling with a gramaphone, trying to look cool.” I hope this doesn’t lead to a room full of fifty somethings attending nostalgia nights air DJ-ing to the scratches from, “Straight out of Compton”, only time will tell.

Links

• Sad news – Selectadisc, my favourite record shop is no more
• DJ hero
• Straight out of Compton
• Guitar Hero
• Badminton guitar
• Be a lazy DJ with iTunes

Wast Water, The Lake District, Cumbria

Just got back from a week in the Lake District and was able to give the camera on my iPhone a good work out as it’s the only camera I took. I particularly like the Pano App by Debarcle Software which I used a lot, including making the picture on this post. It’s all done in camera and if I’d had any signal at this location I could have blogged this whilst looking over the lake. On a slightly different note, the iPhone is by far now the most popular camera phone on the photo sharing site Flickr and has just passed the Canon Digital Rebel as Flickr’s most popular camera.

The Lakes were stunning, as always when the weather is good, but I also liked the muted grey tones you get when the clouds roll in over the hills and absorb much of the light and colour. Wast Water is a particularly great place to visit if you want scenery but it requires a little effort to get to. There’s a good National Trust campsite in Wastdale which I do recommend.

Even though I didn’t take any camera kit, just the phone which was liberating, most of the photos were taken about 5 minutes walk from my tent.

Gallery

[Show as slideshow]