New App in town Leonardo! and ...Yes, I am a Glaze Artist!

Captured: Hipstamatic~Jane Lens, Inas 1969 film Processed: Snapseed, Lens Light, Leonardo, and Glaze

Well it's been an interesting and busy week! I made a retail product out of a few of my beach series images and they are selling well! (It's the retailer in me I suppose) The little 2 x 2 $6.00 ceramic tile, fridge magnets, are really cute! I actually ordered more beach tiles and put in a new order with my "Big Flower" Glazed iPhone images from the summer.

I was officially called a "Glaze Artist" by the developer of Glaze. Well that and a nickle will get ya some coffee...but really that's fun to be recognized by the developer of the App as a "Glaze Artist!"
Some folks that promote software get spiffs but I don't I just like to share products I enjoy....and there is a new one in the App store that is Fabulous as a "Photoshop" quality processing app for your iPhone. It is called Leonardo and is by the developer of PhotoWizard and Superimpose, both of which I also enjoy. Hipstamatic launched a new Black and White film that is free so go shopping for that as well!

I took a little country ride last night and made a few Hipsta shots using the Jane Lens and Ina's 1969 film. They were not very good out of the iPhone but I knew what I was going to do with them so it didn't matter much.  I liked pulling into a farmers field road in the Jeep and snagging a quick shot of the lone tress in the corn field! I emptied my Camera Roll this week down to 120 images and I wanted a few new images to play with!  Below was the original shot...I loved the light on the land behind the trees, the trees themselves and the old three board fence...Snapseed and Leonardo added the pop and Glaze added the painterly effect and LensLight added the moon! TouchRetouch took out the contrails in the upper right hand corner and across the sky.

Before

Also this week I worked with a blind woman and her iPhone, helping her use apps and understand photography a little bit. She is working on a book for blind people and a chapter is on using the iPhone camera and a few selected apps that work really well in Voice over mode. When I was studying before I went to work with her I looked at images on line that were uploaded by blind people and a lot of them were blurry. I wanted to understand why and when I put my iPhone in Voice over mode to use it as the blind people did I quickly understood. The action to fire the shutter requires two taps! Well there ya go, thats just not a good thing...so I tried Clear Cam knowing that it fires six shots and pick the sharpest one and indeed Clear Cam is Voice over accessible in all its menus and seemed to solve the problem. So she will be adding that into her book as an app to get for the Blind Community who want to share images. I must say it was an education for me as well. Patience is required so much more!!!
Tomorrow is my HDR workshop with the Big Camera in downtown Baltimore....and next Sunday I have three spaces left for my iPhone field shoot in the Historic Union Station in Washington, DC.
Here's a link for that if you might be interested in joining in the iPhone photo fun! Click here.
And... one more before and after from last night's country ride....

Sometimes Simple is best~Apps: BracketMode~Sanpseed~ProHDR~TouchRetouch~Photo fx

I posted this iPhone, shot and processed, image to a few social sites including InstaGram, GooglePlus and FaceBook. I received many positive comments from viewers. So much that it made me think about why; What is it about a simple shot of the sun rising through the mist over a body of water? Was it something universal in our human experience that we so loved and related to?
The mystery of fog, the renewal of a new day, the calming effect of water, the suggestion of land, the soft colors of blue and yellow....a combination of elements that must be universally appealing and appreciated.
It also made me want to share the process for this simple yet emotion invoking image. Honestly, it was a hand held grab shot...pointed the iPhone lens toward the sun, made a composition and then made two exposures using the shooting app BracketMode: it is amazing how well this app works for capturing the dynamic range of light in a scene.

BracketMode Exposure 1 for the darks

BracketMode Exposure 2 for the highlights

I then blended these two shots in ProHDR: (making adjustments in the app to achieve this image)

ProHDR processed image

I wanted to make some further image adjustments so I brought the image into SnapSeed and made adjusts to saturation white balance, sharpness and added an off center blur effect.

Snapseed Adjusted image

I didn't like the contrail reflections that appeared in the water and the dark speck of land in the upper left so I used an app called TouchRetouch to make a selection and get rid of the undesirable elements. Touch Retouch is another amazing app, and functions much like content aware in PhotoShop when using the Lasso tool.

TouchRetouch adjusted image removed contrail reflections

I was happy with the tone of the image at this point and removing the contrail reflections helped but I wanted more fog, the image to me was still too harsh. I opened the app Photo fx on the iPhone and applied a fog filter adjusting the opacity to my taste. I also made further adjustments to the color tone in the image to achieve the final image. As a photographer I am still amazed with the shooting and processing possibilities of the iPhone and Apps!

Final image adjusted in Photo fx for tone and fog.

I will be conducting a day long advanced iPhone workshop on March 16 in Gaithersburg, Maryland and will be demonstrating apps and techniques I use to shoot and process images. If you would like to attend click here for registration and more info.

iPhone goes to New York: Hipstamatic:Matty ALN Lens and BlacKeys B&W Film

Bryant Park

Bryant Park

 

Yesterday,  I made a day trip to New York City. I love New York!!! There is no other city in the world like it! The minute you step off the bus the hum of the city can be felt. I was happy to meet a fellow iPhoneographer, Rad Drew and his friends, Shelly and Tony there for a walk around the Midtown area of Manhattan. I first started shooing in Bryant Park while they were on the way to a parking area. I could spend the day shooting in Bryant Park, and I was so happy to see how it has really been updated and improved to become a wonderful, enjoyable city space. Hipstamatic launched a new lens recently and I have not had a chance to shot with it so I selected the Matty ALN lens and BlacKeys B&W film. New York lends itself to monochrome images, but this comb generated a monochrome image with a slight color tone, which I liked and when processing used Iris to saturate the faint colors generated with this combo. Street shooting is sooo much fun! In Times Square there are always people in front of the theaters promoting shows. I love the old time Bobbie socks, saddles and skirt on this woman so I made the shot. Most of the Hipsta shots I use Touch Retouch to remove the date stamp that is inherent with the film choice. Touch Retouch is much like content aware in Photoshop and magically knows what to do. Here I left the date stamp in (by accident) but it shows what the app Touch Retouch can do. I have removed it from all the other shots here.

 In New York everyone walks everywhere! So there are many opportunities to capture people on the go. Legs are everywhere! Since NYC is also the Fashion capital of the US, Models and fashionable women are everywhere in Midtown. I thought this gal was really showing off her best asset! Really short shorts and Super High Heels! You go girl!

 Even this woman had beautiful shoes and and some shapely legs on the move.

 Then there are the street vendors; this one had a beautiful stack of fresh bananas that caught my eye for its texture and pattern repeat.

As we walked, Shelly wanted to share the architecturally interesting Marriott with Rad since he loves architecture, and I loved the show lights on the escalators! So New York....

The inner "black frame" in most of these shots is from Iris FX Dust 'n' Scratches a little menu tab under "more" when you open Iris and tab on FX. The finishing frame is from the Crop'n'Frame app.

Highrise Reflection