Jen Goode asks…

The best part thing the iPhone is not it’s quality for taking photos, especially not the 2G, which lacks the resolution and auto-focus that the 3G has.

The best thing is that it is always in your pocket. If you embrace it for what it is and learn what it does do well, you can take some really fun photos, especially by leveraging some of the apps that are available.

Since Jen also asked if these apps will work on a 2G iPhone, I tested them all out this morning on my old phone (now owned by my 3 year old). That means boring non-artsy pictures of my me and my kids. Sorry.

Here are my current favorites:

Tilt Shift Generator

I think this is my favorite app. It is very simple in that it applies a depth-creating blur in the shape and size that you want in your photo. (iPhone pictures are very flat with everything in focus.) When applied to a landscape photo, or a far-away photo of a busy scene, it looks like a miniature model of the subject. This “Tilt Shift” effect is a trick done with camera lenses with real camera equipment, but can be simulated with some blurring effects.

See how the blurring effect (along with some vignette) gives this picture depth and focuses on the subject. I’ve also saturated the colors.

Here’s a better example of the miniaturization effect you get from this app applied to photos: Old Riverton Inn

Tilt Shift Generator: $0.99 at iTunes

ColorSplash

This app does one thing and does it well. It allows you to desaturate a picture to black and white and color in only what you want. Same picture as above with just Jason’s shirt colored.

Colorsplash: $1.99 at iTunes

Toy Cameras

Hipstamatic and Format126 are both apps that simulate some vintage cameras, the Hipstamatic and Kodak Instamatic 126 format respectively. Format126 allow you to load existing photos as well (which I strongly prefer). Hipstamatic takes the pictures only in a single format, so you need to choose your format ahead of time and take a chance. Just like the real thing! (I’m not that much of a purist. I’d rather be able to experiment with the effects.)

Here’s a self portrait taken with Format126 and its MonoHi style. Blur is the photographer, not the app, but it works no?. This is just one of several effects. You can see them all in my review of the Format126 app.

Here’s the Hipstamatic camera with the default lens. There are several lenses and film effects. many of which you must purchase as add-ons.

Format126: Free at iTunes

Hipstamatic: $1.99 at the itunes store.

CameraBag

Last but not least, Camerabag is a great post-processing app. Again, I prefer to take photos just with the standard iphone camera with no effects and then process it afterwards. That way I can play with the dozens of effects available. CameraBag has some great effects for creating toy camera effects (such as Holga and Lomo) as well some great color, brightness, and saturation manipulation.

Here’s the picture already edited with the tilt-shift generator with the 1972 effect added. What’s also great is that you can apply more than one effect from more than one app.

Camerabag: $1.99 at iTunes.

Sharing on Flickr

You can simply email these pictures to the various services, but since I don’t have email configured on the old 2G iphone (it’s the kid’s movie watching, game playing device now), I used the Mobile Fotos app. It’s a great app for connecting to Flickr and gives good control over titles, descriptions, tags, sets, etc. It just works.

Mobile Fotos: $4.99 on iTunes

I hope you agree, these are some pretty fun pictures that would have otherwise been very, very average and not even worth looking at. I might order a print of that Hipstamatic shot of Jason and try to pass it off as a 40 year old picture of me.

Here are some pictures I’ve taken and processed on the Google phone. In fact this post is created with the Android WPtogo app.

I love the Hipstamatic app, but had no idea of it’s amazing history. I just thought it was among the ranks of LoFi cameras that have inspired some of the great effects that we see in iPhone and Android photography apps like the Holga and Lomo.

Thanks to Marty at Life in LoFi, now we do…

“Hipstamatic is one of the most popular photography apps in the App Store at the moment. It’s in the Top 5 in multiple countries. Flickr groups have popped up. The #hipstamatic hashtag is all over Twitter. The app has universally gotten rave reviews, and deservedly so. The environment, the sounds, the photos — it’s fun to shoot with.”

While I love the app and the effects that it produces, it falls into the category of apps that modify the picture before saving it. To some this is probably part of the fun — you get what you get just like the real thing.

To me, it is squandering the power of the iPhone. Why not store the original photo and allow me to apply any of the effects the camera offers? That would have me in this app all the time to see what it does to any photo I take.

It sounds like the developers are keeping things close to the vest on the future enhancements, but I’m glad to see that that they’re addressing this. From the interview…

We are also working on an app to change the way users manipulate images taken outside of the Hipstamatic. That’s really all we can say at the moment.

I think this enhancement is key and gives them a shot at making this a number one photography app.

If you have an iPhone and haven’t checked out this app, you’re missing out. You can get it at the iTunes store here.

Much like the Hipstamatic app, the Format126 iPhone app brings back the charm of an old school camera, this time in the form of the Kodak Instamatic of the 1960’s. Format126 was developed by Glyn Evans (of iphonegography.com) and Chris Comair.

Being born in the late 60’s myself, I can remember seeing many pictures of this era taken by my family, mostly of me in a snow suit, blowing out birthday candles, or some other mundane activity sporting turtleneck shirts and a bad bowl cut.

The first camera I remember actually using as a child was the Pocket Instamatic, which used 110 film, but there were certainly many stacks of photos around in the square format of the decade-earlier 120 film.

This app hit home so much more than the Helga and Lomo formats available in other Camera Apps neither of which I’ve ever had my hands on the original cameras.

Hands On

I spent some quality time with the Format126 App today. Instead of finding some artsy photos, I decided to take a picture of what my mom would have taken in 1966. Our recent snowfall here in New England. Here is a sample of each of the effects that Format126 includes.

All have the Vignette effect applied as well, and of course the square and border option. (Gray background applied here so you can see the white border on these photos.)

Using the app was intuitive (short a few gotchas which I’ll cover below). Once you start up the app, you’re faced with two choices: take a picture or load an image from the iPhone’s Album.

I really like when camera replacement apps allow me to load an image that I took with the iPhone’s native camera app. (Thanks guys!)

Honestly, I’m yet to find a camera app that makes me want to ditch the snappy and easy to use camera app that comes with the iPhone. I’m glad to be able to apply the unique effects from Format126 to the shots that I’ve taken previously.

Taking a photo with Format126 camera is identical to the native iPhone app, after which you’re presented with the formatting screens. From there, you choose one of the above formats.

All very easy. The transparent menu does obscure the picture, so I did find that I had to go in and out of the effects menu to see what I was getting.

The Gotchas

The app did crash on me a few times, one of which caused me to lose a photo. This might have happened when I was working with the larger photo settings. For this reason, and just because, I think it would be nice if the app saved an original format picture before editing (at least optionally).

I was also thrown by the “done” button. It actually quits out to the main screen and if you haven’t saved a picture, it is gone. Now I know the difference between “done” and “hide”, but it cost me a picture.

The app does have some settings hidden in the iPhone settings app. Be sure to check there for any app. These are frequently missed!

The default (Regular) saves square images in 686×678 pixels. I suppose when the original print sizes were only a few inches square, this resolution more than covers it if you want to print the photos. You can configure Large and Original size images to be saved instead. Warning, this will add significant processing time when you save the pictures. I timed the saves on the larger sizes between 15 and 30 seconds depending on the added effects.

Bottom Line

This is a really fun camera app that brought back some memories for me.

And the price is right: Free (though it’s good enough that I would have happily paid cash money for this.)

Get it!
(now)

Today, OmniVision Technologies announced the availability of a new 14.6 megapixel HD image sensor that’s capable of 60 fps for full 1080p HD video. That’s a far cry from the current 3.2-megapixel camera in the iPhone 3GS.

Apple switched to OmniVision Technologies as the source for the camera chips in the iPhone 3GS and there’s already talk of Apple using OVT’s 5-megapixel chips in their next generation iPhone due summer 2010.

With more and more mega-pixels, what’s to become of the iPhone photographers, who coax incredible art out of the current lo-tech? Will everybody with an iPhone be able to take amazing pictures?

Does more mega-pixels matter?

It isn’t about pixels. The tiny lens and resulting small aperture and focal-length are major contributors to the quality (or lack thereof) that we get out of the iPhone in less than optimal conditions. With everything else remaining the same, more pixels won’t result in better pictures.

We don’t need your stinking mega-pixels

A 3.2-megapixel camera can produce more than enough resolution for any online viewing, say, on Flickr. Even for printing, 3.2-megapixels is plenty for your standard 3×5 or 4×6 prints. How many poster-sized prints do we need from any camera?

Improve You.

What will make a difference much more than mega-pixels is higher quality lenses, analog zoom, low-light performance (which more pixels works against).

What will make the biggest difference of all is when you realize that the camera isn’t taking the picture. The photographer is taking the picture. The skilled photographer knows the capabilities limits of the tool he or she has, and can make the best of it. The camera is just there to capture the shot and make it easier.

To answer the question posed in the title of this post, no, I don’t think so.

Improved technology will allow the iphone to work better in more conditions, like low light or long-distance, approaching the capabilities of point and shoot cameras. But the iPhone is still a computer with an operating system. Software developers can still create a LO-FI camera that emulates a Helga camera or a Kodak Instamatic camera. The photographers who know how to make those cameras dance will continue to impress.

ShiningWorks brought us for Christmas exactly what we weren’t looking for. A way to turn our beautiful iPhone into Vintage plain ol’ point and shoot camera: The G700-1st Soft Camera.

Here’s what you see when you start up the app. First thing you have to do after you start the app is, uh, turn it on.

Once you do that, you’ll see that you’ve got a fully functional point and shoot camera right there inside your iPhone.

The app does have some features that are generally wished for, such as flash (software), zoom, anti-shake, timer, burst mode. You can also set the date and geographic location to appear on the picture itself.

The problem with a zoom feature on an iPhone is that it is digital zoom (no matter what app). You can’t expect great results from that. The flash simply brightens the shot. Anti-shake wasn’t really what I was expecting. It simply gives you an indicator that tells you that you’re moving the camera and won’t take the picture until you keep it still, like Night Camera does. Here I’m shaking the camera violently, sending the strangely high-resolution, multi-color, shake-o-meter into redline for demonstration purposes…

The Gold Member skin on the phone is not the default. I chose it out of a selection of 4 different appearances for the camera:

Once you’ve taken your pictures, you can browse then and apply a number of different effects, like a vignette, Candy, Movie, Vintage, Sepia, etc. It also has some basic sharing functionality.

Now for the Bad news…

Some important limitations are that it only shoots in 800×600 mode on an iPhone 3G and 1024×768 on a 3Gs. For those of you wondering, thats .5 and .8 megapixel vs. the 3.1 Megapixels you get from the regular camera on the iPhone 3Gs. Frankly, this puzzles me.

Taking a picture with this app on my phone took 5 seconds to process (vs a second or two on the standard iPhone Camera. I’m not sure what it is doing for 5 seconds.

Bottom Line

The $2.99 G700 app is a fun toy that does a great job at simulating the appearance of point and shoot camera.

I have three of those already. I like my iPhone camera the way it is.

On New Years Day I had the privilege of attending the NHL Winter Classic game between the Boston Bruins and the Philadelphia Flyers. What an amazing experience. And the Bruins winning in overtime was a bonus.

I took several photos with my iPhone, but a few of the better ones were done with the Pano app.

This first picture was 7 or 8 shots in portrait mode. By the time I panned all the way to the right, my camera drifted to having a bit of a tilt. If you view it in full size on flickr, you can see where I have a few mis-matched edges.

Still, it gets the job done.

This second one is just two pictures stitched together, and ended up being the source of a lot of fun with the CameraBag app…

…producing shots like this one.

I used this image to really get a good look at all the different effects that Camerabag produces. More on that soon.

Was just reading this post on photocritic.org this morning about the amazing iPhone photography of Sion Fullana.

It’s a bit of a shame that Sion has to defend his artistic methods and workflow, or clarify so strongly on his Flickr page that his photos are “NEVER” photoshopped.

Reading this post this morning, and especially the comments, has got me to thinking about what is iPhone photography, or “iPhontography”, “iPhoneography”, or “Phonetography” as I call it here. I hadn’t previously set rules in my own mind about what qualifies, except of course that the photo started on a camera phone (not even necessarily an iPhone).

One commenter, Knox Bronson from iphontography.org, said

I am obsessed with iPhone photography. I love the limitations of the 2 megapixel, no flash, no zoom, etc., camera. In fact I have created a website for iPhone photography (click on sig) and am seeking submissions for a gallery show in Berkeley Ca.

That said, I am afraid Sion disqualified herself as an iPhontographer the minute [he] manipulated the image on [his] Mac. Either the image stays ON the iPhone or then it’s just another photoshopped whizbang. That is not say she doesn’t create nice images, but once you pull the picture off the phone, you can do anything with it.

From iphontography.org’s submission guidelines,

3. Images must have been taken with the iPhone and edited with the iPhone ONLY. No exporting to Photoshop for levels adjusting, for example. To clarify, using any application on the iPhone itself to modify, enhance, manipulate the image is permitted; exporting the image to a computer for the same is not permitted.

The iPhone is a computer

There’s a photoshop app on the iPhone.

If you take a picture using the Hipstamatic iPhone app (such as Sion’s “4 Lives in or out of a Starbucks cafe”), it’s doing all sort of “photoshopping” for you, adding artifacts to the picture along the way in various ways. I fail to see the difference. You can pretty much do anything to a photo without first taking it off your iPhone.

I don’t mean to make this about the rules on iphontography.org. I respect what they’re doing. Their exhibit. Their rules. I actually think it’s totally cool to set a rule that everything has to happen on the iPhone itself.

I just don’t love that he called out Sion as “disqualifying himself as an iPhontographer”. I hope he just meant that he’d be disqualified as an “iphontography.org iPhontographer.”

As I said in the comment thread (which is awaiting approval on this New Years Day), as long as you’re being honest about what you’re doing, there should be no limit to what you choose to do with your own art.

Sion himself said it best just a few weeks ago in that post…

Please don’t take this as any form of attack to your comment. I totally value your opinion. I’m just trying to prove that when it comes to iPhone photography, the biggest joy of it all is that it’s a movement whose rules we write every day, and the sky is the limit. No one neither can nor should say what iPhoneography truly is. Just keep working all of us to make it become a permanent and rich artistic movement.

I needed someone to take a picture of me today and I was home alone with the kids. So what did I do? I set up my three year old with a tripod. He did a great job and got some really nice shots.

I turned the camera back on him and got a nice iPhone shot of him, but as typical with the iPhone, there was good outdoor light and the focus and ISO was good, but still the picture came out plain.

ColorSplash

What’s great about the iPhone is that you don’t have to stop there! Since he had his orange jacket on, I fired up ColorSpash and grayed out everything except the jacket. If you haven’t played with ColorSpash, you NEED to. It is so fun and very easy. Basically the entire picture is turned gray and you color with your finger the parts you want the color to be returned. You can zoom in as much as you need to get exactly what you want, like you can see here to the right. In this shot, I’ve partially colored in his collar. And I end up with this:

Tilt Shift Generator

That’s more fun, but it is still pretty flat. Next, to try some different exposures, blurring, and vignette effects I fire up TiltShiftGen. There are many apps that I could have used for this, but this is my favorite app recently particularly because of the blurring tool. You select the center and pinch-drag to set the radius. Then the slider sets how sharp or gradual the blur effect is.

Adjusting contrast and adding vignette brings out the subject and diminishes the distracting background objects.

The blurred doorway gives it the depth of field that it needs so badly but the iPhone cannot produce.

Final Result

And here’s what I ended up with for the final result.

So much more interesting, I think. The picture comes to life.

The Camera Finder page on flickr.com has some very telling data.

First of all, the most popular camera overall in the Flickr Community is the Apple iPhone 3G. That’s more popular than any Canon or Nikon.

That right there is a pretty amazing and telling fact. Of course we have to keep in mind that the nature of the iPhone is that has the capability of sending pictures directly to Flickr. If the DSLR and Point and Shoot cameras had this capability, they would surely dwarf the iPhone as certainly if you look at the numbers of actual photos that are taken with regular cameras must be orders of magnitude larger than with camera phones.

I did notice that the Apple iPhoone 3G line flattened and even started to drop. This next graph might explain that. The iPhone 3GS seems to be taking over.

Another important note that Flickr has on this page.

The graphs are only accurate to the extent that we can automatically detect the camera used to take the photo or shoot the video (about 2/3rds of the time). That is not usually possible with cameraphones, therefore they are under-represented.

Regardless, the trends are all very positive toward more and more actual photography being done with Cameraphones. And this will only continue, especially as cameras improve on our smartphones.