I often take pictures along the San Mateo coast, near where I live in Pacifica, California, just a bit south of San Francisco. What they say about writing — “Write what you know” — I find true for pictures, too — take pictures of what you know. I know the coast well, I’m near the water a lot, so I take a lot of pictures there. And of course the camera I always have with me is the iPhone, in my case the iPhone 4.
Over the past six or eight months especially, I often leave the DSLR at home when I go for these beach walks. Sure, I use the big camera for commercial and private clients, but more and more, I find the incredible creative options available to us via photo apps more fun and more liberating than working in Lightroom and Photoshop. How great would it be if the big camera makers opened up their inner workings so that app developers could create apps for them, too?
This particular scene is very near home. On this day, there were many people enjoying the late afternoon sun on an unusually warm early spring day. The initial exposures were made with the iPhone’s camera in HDR mode (which gives the images a wide dynamic range). In Photoshop Express, I cropped three images for the portions that I thought were the most interesting. Then I combined them with the BlendCam app. I then imported the blended image into the Camera+ app, where I applied a sepia toning with the Analog Chromogenic setting. I also used Camera+ to apply the picture frame. You can see a larger version of the photo on my Flickr stream here.
I get a lot of ideas and information by looking at what people post on Instagram, like I’m sure a lot of you do, too. And thanks to Doc Pop and the other folks involved with Objective Scenes for letting me share some of what I do, too.
