floating along

floating along

Thanks for following along this week, and thanks, Doc, for asking me to stop by.

It’s been an interesting week in the sense that the pressure has been on to come up with something suitable for sharing here on OS. I really can’t imagine the creative tension that Doc has created for himself by committing to his DAILY appsperiment.

The process certainly has helped me understand the attraction of “365″ projects, where you take photos of something, usually yourself, every day for a year. There’s even an app for that, too, called Project 365. It encourages you to hold your own feet to the fire and take pictures every day, and I guess that’s a good thing. I take pictures every day, but knowing you’re going to have to share them puts the process in a different category.

Anyway, enough preamble. Today’s pic utilizes a couple of my favorite apps, and it was taken at one of my favorite places, the San Mateo coast of Northern California, just south of San Francisco. Continue reading

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city hall wedding

city hall wedding
One of the things that we do in real life is shoot weddings. Yes, we’re that guy. We actually love being that guy. We’ve gone places, seen things, and made friends we otherwise never would have. And we count ourselves very lucky for all of it.

So today we combined a wedding with some iPhone appsperimentation, and here are the results.
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Look! Up in the Sky!

look, up in the sky!

Hi again, and thanks for following along!

Today’s picture is comparatively straightforward, but it employs one of my favorite iPhone apps, Decim8.
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the dreamy sea

the dreamy, foggy pier
We went back to the beach for today’s shot, in our case the familiar and foggy San Mateo coast.

One of our favorite things about the iPhone is the ability to take long exposure pictures in the daytime. No neutral density filters necessary, either. It’s amazing, really. To get a 15-second exposure in the daytime on your DSLR, you’d need … oh, I don’t know, maybe two -10 stop filters stacked on your lens? And then you wouldn’t be able to see or focus on your subject, because the filters would make everything in the viewfinder dark.
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there goes the sun. again.

there goes the sun

Hi again all, and let me offer my apologies right up front: A sunset picture?? On a blog about experimental iPhone work?

Yes, I’m guilty, but here’s my thinking: there MIGHT be something for you to take away from this photo, even if it has a mundane subject matter.

(Full disclosure: I am hopelessly addicted to sunset pictures, at least ones that are done passably well. When the Flickr Blog used to interview photographers, their last question always was: “Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers?” because those were four of the most common shots on Flickr. My answer would have been sunsets, and that hasn’t changed. It’s nature’s light show, and a very cheap date. I’m also very easily amused.  Ok, onward.)

I’ve posted this one to show that even with an iPhone, it’s possible to capture photos with an amazingly high dynamic range. The sun SHOULD be completely blown out here, and there should be very little color tonality in the sky because the highlights are so strong. But that’s not the case. So how did we do it? Continue reading

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the local scene

appreciating the sun, Pacifica, CA

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?
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