A few photos from the past to motivate your 2013 
Table mountain, South Africa. See the breathless hush of this world, before you discover the next…
Stand on the edge of a glacier. The air still tastes of raw, scuplted creation.
Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah. Speed Trials. You vs physics.
More filter fun, more light and shade choices, with InstaEditor. Free too.
There are lots of free photo apps you can download, but one of my favourites is InstaEditor for iPhone and iPad.
Just like Instagram, it has a basic range of colour filters you can apply, but the extra bonus is that InstaEditor has Brightness, Saturation, Sharpness and Contrast settings that you can dial in.
Once you have your image – you can take a photo or choose from your library, then choose a colour filter, add backlighting, or night settings, then swipe the dashboard menu at the bottom of the screen.
Tap Brightness if you want to enhance a night time photo, or if you have something that’s looking a little washed out, dial in some extra colour saturation.
You just click Apply after adding each effect, the app saves your tweaks as you go along.
You can dab away things like Red Eye, or add a splash of white to sections of the photo too.
When you’re finished, tap Done and the photo is automatically saved to your iPhone photos. You can share it immediately, or put the tweaked image through something else like say iQuik Dof – this lets you use your fingertip to choose which section of an image is in/out of focus.
Basically this app is easy-peasy, lemon squeezy to use, costs nothing and apart from a message inviting you to play a game each time you use it, has no annoying features.
Get snapping smartphone lovers
No filters, taken at night, 40w bulb. Bit wishy washy.
Here are two pics from my iPhone 4, taken at night. First has no filters, next has InstaEditor and iQuik DoF applied.
Use the app and add some blingy bling baby.
Surely running a paragliding business out of a resort town with a name that translates to Sea of the Dead, would have to be a bad omen? From the ~2000m summit of Babadağ I took a leap of faith, content to either fly like a bird or a stone down to the turquoise Blue Lagoon. Luckily for me, I flew like the avian former.
One of the best features on Apple’s iPhone is the camera. Truly pin sharp images, little bit fuzzy at night maybe, but any modern smartphone makes photo sharing a joy 90% of the time. Point, shoot, edit and share – simple.
Coming from a film SLR background, the iPhone was a revelation to me; if you had told me back in 2000 that a phone could take a photo like this one of Ted on the beach, then you could tweak the image in 5 mins and share it globally, I would never have believed that possible. But it is and here are my top three Apps worth sampling if you love photography:
Use iQuikDoF to highlight one part and soften another section of your image.
1. 1QuickDoF
This is a depth of field app, which lets you throw sections of an image out of focus and highlight one area for absolute sharpness.
It can really make a big difference if you have a picture with some strong foreground interest, or maybe there’s a logo or product that you want to highlight in a commercial photo.If you use a jquery slideshow feature in your website, then this is a really easy way to make your new products, news or show coverage sections come to life.
It’s a free app, there’s a simple to use dashboard and it’s easy to save the image or choose `Share’ on the go. If you want more, there’s an iQuikDoF Pro upgrade available from the Apple App Store too.
2. Pixlr-o-matic
If you find Instagram has a limited set of features, which it does – there’s just 12 filters – then Pixlromatic might help you express your creative side that bit better. You get three scroll-thru dashboards at the bottom of the App interface, so you can choose filters, then switch to a frames selection and maybe use the `lightbulb’ option to add some kinda wacky stuff like a light `leak’ or maybe a vignette look.
Pixlr-o-matic is free and you can download it to your laptop browser, or directly to Facebook, as well as install it to your phone. If you like editing photos and you feel you need to see the image a bit bigger then this is a handy extra feature.
3. Slow Shutter
This App costs 69p but for my money, it’s worth it. The iPhone isn’t a particularly good camera at night and the flash really only works within a 1-2 metre range. So if you like taking photos at sunrise or sunset, then sharing via Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, then Slow Shutter is a handy tool.
The App dashboard lets you choose exposure times from half a second to 15 seconds, plus there’s a `bulb’ feature, just like an old SLR camera, where you select a really long exposure. But for this App to really work, you need a tripod, as I found out when I tried the classic `car light trails’ photo from a bridge.
The iPhone is so light, it's hard to keep it 100% still without a tripod
As you can see, even carefully balancing the iPhone on the bridge rail and trying to steady it by leaning against a lamp post, still resulted in a tiny degree of camera shake – so bluury image. This was using a 15 second exposure at twilight by the way.
I’ve bought a mini tripod and zoom lens kit from Amazon this weekend, so I’ll update you on how the Slow Shutter App performs with some extra gadgetry involved.
The iPhone doesn’t have a focus lock feature, as far as I know, so it may well be that the phone will keep trying to focus on a moving object using Slow Shutter. Maybe selecting the Grid option will stop this happening – testing the camera, and the App, using a tripod will hopefully reveal that it’s possible to get time-lapse images that can rival a digital SLR.
The dream photo App for me would be a `Palette,’ where you could finger-tap colours, contrast the clouds in the sky, dab at sections to filter, turn monochrome etc. Use your hand like a brush basically. A true mix between photography and art would be wonderful – give the App developers another 2 years and I reckon we will be there.
Photo sharing is one of the best reasons for buying a smartphone in my book. It’s just great fun, you can be creative every day at the drop of a hat – you don’t have a carry a bulky bag which shouts `I’m a photographer’ either.
See you on Instagram, Pinterest, plus I’m twittering on @Npointsocial
Reading about Kodak’s financial problems this week brought home to me how the internet and digital media has totally transformed our lives over the last decade or so. The changes in our lives are profound and cannot be undone; the tide has turned for the UK High Street, publishing, insurance and many other sectors – there’s no going back.
The Kodak brand will survive, but will the company itself?
For Kodak fans, those old enough to recall using beautiful slide film like Kodachrome 64, or an Instamatic camera, it truly is the end of an era. The absolute irony in all this of course is that Kodak had the very first digital camera on the market, way back in 1975, but never made that technology the bedrock of their business.
Instead, Kodak were seduced by the chemistry of film, the profits from the commercial printer market and carried on manufacturing disposable cameras and home printers for far too long, when it was obvious that social sharing of photos was replacing an entire way of life for millions of people.
We point our phones, shoot pictures, tweak them using Instagram and publish on Twitter and Facebook – Kodak is nowhere in that process. It is blurring into history, like over-exposed camera film itself.
DIGITAL MEDIA MADE US RETHINK WHAT `WORK’ IS ALL ABOUT
Here’s a short breakdown of how we used to produce photographs for newspapers and magazines when I worked in media back in the 90s;
1. We tried to choose a sunny day and nice location to take photos of motorbikes
2. A professional photographer was booked – vast expense, plus travel expenses
3. Spend all day composing shots, shooting maybe 10 rolls of slide film
4. Slide films sent to a lab – the `lab’ was often a basement beneath a dingy camera shop
5. Day later we got strips of transparency images
6. Back to office, fire up huge light box and view pics with Mr Magoo sized magnifying glass
7. Argument breaks out amongst editorial staff on which shots to use
8. Use scissors to choose best images, individually wrap slides in bags, send for drum scan
9. Page Designer adds scanned images to text, plus incorrect caption
10. Saved pages sent off to printer, Cromalin proofs back two days later
11. Argument breaks out as to who reversed the image meaning it says `ADNOH’ not ‘HONDA.’
12. Final proofs signed off, magazine goes to print
13. Photos taken some two or three weeks previously finally appear in WH Smiths
Bill Hottinger using a lightbox, the way we used to work in media
That incredible labour-intensive process, which required experienced editors, journos, photographers, camera shop lab geeks, page designers, printers, van drivers and finally an assistant in a newsagents to sell the magazine, is rapidly vanishing – or gone. Seen many camera shops, or job vacancies for journalists lately?
We are all bloggers now with spelling and grammar apps to correct any mistakes, or Smartphone photographers with Photoshop Lite, Instagram or Pinterest to edit our pictures. We publish our content for free via social media, instead of selling it. Companies sponsor blogs and product reviews, instead of bribing journalists with freebies and alcohol-fuelled product launch parties.
Things are still changing fast; surely it’s only a matter of time until a Magazine Editor app allows us to publish our own monthly or weekly titles, packed with slick photos and short video clips, then sell them for 99p, with Amazon, Google or Facebook taking a cut of that revenue?
That day will come and when it does, that spells the end of the newsagent, along with a huge part of the existing `paper’ newspaper and magazine industry. Kodak isn’t the only media giant staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, it’s just that some publishers don’t have the vision to see what’s hurtling towards them on the social media horizon.
Our whole idea of what publishing is, what photography is, and how people `work’ within those industries will continue to change, as the pace of social media technology quickens and our digital lives evolve. Nobody is immune from these changes, so brace yourself; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
AW
Twittering on @npointsocial
