Digital Imaging — iPhoneography

Being involved with professional photography for quite a long time now, I can recall my early days in photography school (1963) learning the art of light, composition, color theory, film exposure, printmaking and the challenges that came with every assignment. That education continued with photography workshops and membership in professional photography organizations. During that time, my equipment included Mamiya (6x7 and 645) medium format cameras for studio portrait work; the Bronica medium format and Canon 35mm format were for my wedding photography.

Fall of 2000 brought the introduction of the Canon D30 (priced at the $2,500 range), it was the first independently built digital camera by Canon since their breakaway from Kodak. This was my first digital camera, and my first question was “now what?”. Thank goodness for digital photography forums, I learned a lot from those. The rise of the DSLR camera and the demise of film had begun. This continued to a point with a plethora of digital cameras available to both consumers and professionals. That, along with computer software for editing those images, brought an explosion to what is now commonly known today as “Digital Imaging”.

The year 2000 also introduced the first camera phones, and my favorite iPhone smartphone was introduced in June of 2007. These iOS and Android devices have provided a new genre known as iPhoneography for the Apple iPhone.

Mobile apps for these smartphones were originally offered for general productivity and information retrieval, including email, calendar, contacts, and stock market and weather information. However, public demand and the availability of developer tools drove rapid expansion into other categories, such as mobile games, factory automation, GPS and location-based services, banking, photography, order-tracking, ticket purchases and recently mobile medical apps.

While there are tons of photography apps available, I assure you that you can become seriously inundated with too many apps. So, for starters, the first to consider is a camera app. While the iPhone camera does a fine job, its’ features are limited. You might want to consider Camera+, ProCamera 7, Kitcamera and Slowshutter. You can do a search for these apps on the internet – remember to add “app” to the one you are searching. Among the features I like are stabilization, leveling and separate touches for focus and exposure. Some of these apps may include artsy filters and effects.

Among the popular apps for photo editing, consider Snapseed, Filterstorm Neue, Mextures, Noir and Diptic. These are the creative, fun apps. Getting to know a few for starters will help to retain your sanity.

My workflow for my DSLR images is to start with them in Lightroom 5 for color, contrast/brightness and sharpening. Then convert these images to JPG’s, sending select images to my iPad via Transfer ($2.99) or Dropbox (the Basic plan is free for 2GB+)). My iPhone 5C images are automatically sent to Dropbox for retrieval on any of my computers or devices.

The question used to be, “What f/stop did you use?”,

Now the question is, “What app did you use?” 

Here are a few more things I have done and for now, I cannot recall what app I used, other than when an image is saved, some apps will create a folder specifically for that app. Others just go to the camera roll.