A quick snapshot in the airport caught this moment that I would have missed trying to stop and pull out the "big" camera
Like millions of suckers around the world, I am an admitted follower of the cult leader who is Steve Jobs. While not a “fly to New York, sleep on the sidewalk awaiting the iPad” type fanatic, I am nonetheless a believer that things should be simple. Ask any of my clients and you hear my familiar mantra that less is more. We got to the moon on a computer that couldn’t run a modern alarm clock, yet we insist on making things more and more complex for ourselves. But I digress, this is not a tirade against the evils of technology, I wanted to talk about why I love my iPhone camera for everyday shooting.
the iPhone camera is certainly no marvel of photographic technology, but its enough to make great little snapshots of moments that you simply could not catch if you had to stop, open your gear bag, put together an SLR with the correct lens, strobe and all the other crap that goes into just taking a photo. Then, after you have made a nice little photo, there are a variety of tools available, in camera, that you can use to touch up the photos a bit, then what is really the revolutionary part…sharing.
One of the biggest gripes my family has is they never get shots of our toddler. Sure, I take a million photos of him (ok, 7204 tagged in Adobe Lightroom at the moment), but then I just sit on them because honestly, making prints of him, getting them distributed to various interested parties, doesn’t produce billable hours. I get to enjoy them, but by the time I import them to Lightroom, I’ve forgotten about them anyway.
So, how does the iPhone solve this? Immediately after taking a photo, doing some basic tweaks, I can either email it to whoever, or more impressively, post it straight to Facebook.
After skating out of shooting a friend's wedding, I was able to capture this intimate moment from my table
The Tools
I just use the basic iPhone camera for my photos. I have the iPhone set up so that to access the camera fast by just double clicking the “home” button (in case of something way gnarly going on, I can get to it without fumbling around for the icon). To set this, tap on your iPhone’s Settings icon (with the gears) Then tap on “General”. (In this setting are a couple important things, 1 is the Passcode lock, I HIGHLY recommend this be turned on if you are prone to losing your phone, or have toddlers who like to push buttons).
To set the camera, tap on “Home”, and then tap on “Camera”. This will set the iPhone to go straight to Camera upon double clicking the iPhone main button. So when your little one rolls up on you in Momma’s high heels, and wearing a cowboy hat, you can quickly get the shot.
The Software The main App I use for photos is CameraBag ($1.99 in the App Store). Install it on your iPhone and you have an instant little dark room. Below are some sample images from CameraBag. CameraBag is a seperate application from Camera (it can also act as a camera). Tapping on the icon opens CameraBag, the double rectangle icon in the lower right accesses your camera roll, where you can select the image you just took. Once selected, you can apply a number of fun filters to the image (Helga (which I believe may have been intended to mimic the look of a Holga camera), Logo, Instant, Mono, 1974, Infrared, Magazine, Silver, 1962, Cinema, Fisheye, and Colorcross are the most recent filters as of this writing. To apply a filter to the image, just tap the name, “1974″ in the case below. It shows you the preview, and you can save the image from here or email it directly out.
 Standard Image Straight Out of the iPhone (and yes, standard moron behavior by yours truly) |
 Same Shot, but Using CameraBag "Lolo" Filter which adds a nice white border, and some contrast addition |
Share
The best part. Now that you have taken your all time favorite photo (at least for today), and you have put a smooth 70′s retro look to the photo, now you can easily share the photo with friends and family. In the iPhone, while looking at an image, there is a little icon in the lower left side of the image of an arrow, leaving a rectangle. Click on that, and you now have a menu of options, Email Photo and MMS are the two we’ll worry about today, the other two options are for assigning a photo to a contact or setting an image as your desktop photo.
A quick step back from a shoot
Email Photo. Clicking this option will open up your email application, you enter the address(s) of gets the photo, and click “Send”. It will send the email as an attachment, and presto, you have fulfilled your Fatherly duties to update the family on little Johnny’s exploits. More seriously, you may one day find yourself in a situation where your photo may capture an important event, or you could use it to document a fender bender, whatever, it does have practical uses for anyone who is serious about photography.
Facebook I highly recommend the Facebook App (Free in the App Store). In addition to updating your status, you can also upload photos by clicking on the camera icon in Facebook. Again, another great way to share images with friends and family.
The photo below was a three shot stitch I did at Raymond James Stadium just before a U2 concert in 2009. The iPhone is not blessed with neither a generous angle of viewing, nor a large sensor, so I took three photos to try and capture the enormous stage setup. I stitched the three shots using Adobe Lightroom.
Here is a link to some popular iPhone camera Apps
Link to the Annual iPhone Photography Awards
Three shot stitch of U2 Stage Setup