A few weeks later I’m sort of getting the itch again. Just a tingling really, nothing to see the doctor about. Well, I had a little look in the photography section of the App Store the other day, not to buy anything you understand, just to see if there was anything new and exciting to play with and clicked on Hipstamatic (App Store link) almost by chance really. There’s quite a lot of Lomo and Holga style apps already, and I felt like I had got one of the best in ToyCamera. Hipstamatic’s icon isn’t flashy, but the name is catchy and it had a great rating, so I gave it a go and I love it.

It’s so fun to play with and use. The way it works is that you have the basic Hipstamatic ‘body’ and you select a combination of one lens and one film, then optionally charge up one of four ‘flashes’. The display has two ‘sides’, the front and back of the imaginary Hipstamatic camera, styled after the Instamatic range of cameras. Along the bottom of the front display are buttons allowing you to change the film, flash or lens, buy new packs from the shop or flip to the back screen. Alternatively you can swipe the lens to swap in the next available lens. On the back is a small squarish live viewfinder, the flash charger and the huge yellow shutter release button, and if you shake the phone you get a completely random setup.

So you select your film, lens and optional flash, take the shot, then wait a few seconds while it ‘prints’ the shot and saves it into the iPhone camera roll as well as the app’s own gallery. Tapping the gallery button takes you into a gorgeous gallery display where you slide through your recent prints. Tapping one flips it over to reveal the lens, film and flash settings. From here you can copy the settings for your next shot, share it through Facebook, Twitter or email, bin it or enter it into one of the regular contests the developers run.

A full kit comprises 8 films, 6 lenses and 4 flashes but the app comes with only 3 lenses (John S, Jimmy, and Kaimal Mark II), two flashes (Standard and Dreampop), and two films (Ina’s 1969, and Kodot Verichrome) as standard and further expansions cost 59p per ‘Hipstapack’. Each pack usually contains at least one lens and film, and occasionally an extra flash and purchasing them takes you into a custom-built store with it’s own gorgeous graphics. I really love all this attention to detail.

So it’s a pretty slick app!

The fact that you can combine any film with any lens means that theoretically you’ve got 48 different looks available, plus even more variations on those by using one of the different flashes which basically just apply a splash or wash of colour or ‘light’ depending on what you use. In practice, however, a few of the different looks are all but identical apart from the frame applied. On the other hand, something I really liked is that while other apps often have a set vignette effect that doesn’t change much if at all from shot to shot, Hipstamatic appears to have quite a variety available meaning it’s rare to get exactly the same vignette effect on two consecutive shots using the same settings. That’s a nice touch and really adds to the realism of the effect.

In the name of testing these effects, I spent 20 minutes crouched in Hyde Park trying each and every combination on the same scene. You better appreciate this:

Rows are the lens effects, columns are the film effects

If you’d like to see it in much greater detail, the original is available to download from Flickr here – a 12MB download but each image is original resolution.

As you can see, the first three films are identical except for frame, and I hope you can see what I mean about the slightly naff Kodot frame! B&Ws are also pretty similar, and although the blurb for the first BlacKeys film says it prints the date on, the only date I’ve ever seen is MAR 80 so I’m not too sure what’s happening there. Nice frames though, and my favourite film of all of them is the last one, Float. I love the smudgy contrasty vignette and artifacts it produces.

In terms of the lenses themselves there’s a good selection of looks no matter your taste, although John S is the one I find myself going back to most often. Don’t forget to experiment with all the films though. For example, the severe yellow look of Jimmy doesn’t do much for me until it’s paired with the Float film and you get a nice slightly faded off-green look. On the other hand, Kaimal turns everything a bit too red, and again the Float film saves the day, pulling it all back a bit.

It’s almost churlish to moan about something with such variety and charm, but… as I touched on above the two films that come with the basic pack and a third from the premium packs are exactly the same in terms of colour processing with the only difference being the frame they apply. The premium of these, Kodot, has a really fake looking scrappy frame which I think is the poorest of all 8 films. While I’m being picky, the two B&W films also seem pretty similar except for the frame despite implying in the name that one offers more contrast.

I only noticed when having a look close-up that several of the lenses (Jimmy, Helga and Lucifer) aim to recreate the imperfect toy-camera look by ghosting the image and you end up with what looks like camera shake on a long exposure. I’m not a fan of that as I’d rather they just slightly softened the image around the edges rather than make me look like I’ve got the shakes. It’s a shame as Helga and Lucifer in particular produce some lovely colouring.

I’m critiquing on a very personal level but hey, I’ve used a lot of Lomo-like camera apps and spent many an hour tinkering in Photoshop creating similar looks for own DSLR images so I knows what I likes. So I’ve got a couple of reservations, but I love this app as much for it’s fun interface and the huge variety of looks it produces as for getting me back into iPhone photography. This is well worth your cash, folks, and to give you a flavour of how it performs on scenes other than Hyde Park, here’s a few more shots I took the same day.

Cheers for reading!

Here’s a list of cool stuff I use at the moment, none of which falls under any particular category. Consider it more of a Buffet of Cool. Fill your plate with as much or as little as you like and do feel free to pitch in with some of your own Discoveries of Cool.

Dropbox

I went on and on about Dropbox recently. It’s just awesome and the free version will probably be more than enough for you. Basically, you install their software and a special folder on every computer you want to use and whatever you put in the folder on one computer appears in the same folder on all the other computers in seconds (usually).

I used to use it for simple things like keeping callsheets available on every computer, even my iPhone, no matter where I was, but then I realised I could use it to sync my website code documents, 1Password keychain, Things to-do databases, even my Safari bookmarks. It’s absolutely fantastic. I can be editing my website on my iMac at home, grab my MBP, head out the door to work, then pick up where I left off on the laptop in my lunch break (provided it was able to connect to a network at some point to download the latest files in the background). When I get home, I can go back to using the iMac, without having to manually sync a single kilobyte of data.

It’s a total game changer, for me anyway. Try it, it’s completely free, and if you use my link we’ll both get a bit of extra space on top of the 2GB they start you off with.

Just Mobile Gum Battery for iPhones

Yep, the iPhone battery runs out pretty quick. I can’t argue with that. I would point out that of course it’s going to run out quick if you spend hours playing music and games on it and surfing the web and taking photos and running app and touching the screen and everything else the all iPhone users are understandably addicted to, and in that sense it’s got about the same lifespan as a laptop being used equally heavily, but hey.

So, what to do? Well, while you’re waiting for Apple to find a way to cram a few more hours of use into the thing, you’ll probably want to pick up an external battery pack/charger. There’s loads out there, some that rigidly stick out of the dock connector (which seem to me to be extremely prone to snapping off), some that are built into the back of a case the iPhone fits into and make the phone another half centimetre thicker. I plumped for the Just Mobile Gum which cost about £25 from eBuyer a few months ago. You charge it up, connect it to your iPhone using a standard iPhone/iPod USB-to-dock connector cable, and it can fully recharge your iPhone 1.5 times. So with this in my bag I’ve easily got enough juice to last a full day and then some. I suppose it’s not that pretty but at least it won’t snap off in my pocket.

Photo Mechanic

I came across Photo Mechanic while peering over the shoulder of a unit stills photographer on the set of Spooks. I’d been using Bridge to view and manage libraries of my photos from shoots, because that was all I knew about having just got to grips with Photoshop. However, I’d been unhappy with the way Bridge read my RAW files, as it seemed to apply a base set of RAW adjustments to the images which altered them from the way they looked on the back of my camera, and I couldn’t settle on revised base settings that matched the look I wanted. It seemed totally wrong to me that the software should apply any changes. I’m sure this has probably all changed now*, but I don’t think I’d move away from Photo Mechanic now.

It’s not cheap, but it’s my first port of call for everything after a shoot: ingesting from a CF card, renaming, applying IPTC stationary and copyright information, reviewing, colour and star-tagging, sorting, sending to pertinent photo-editing applications based on file-type, even exporting to a variety of web-ready galleries including the rather cool Flash-based galleries by Airtight such as Simple Viewer and Postcard Viewer. My preference at the moment is for the PM Classic gallery, a contact-sheet style HTML-based gallery that has the advantage of playing nice on iPhones.

* UPDATE: It hasn’t changed at all. I just gave Bridge CS4 a whirl (I’d not launched it once since installing alongside Photoshop CS4) and while it does have a very slick interface these days, with loads of filtering, organising, viewing and customising options, it also applies Adobe Camera Raw defaults to your RAW photos in the viewer, meaning that the custom Picture Control settings I set up on my Nikon D700 are rendered pointless. For this simple reason, Bridge is next to useless for me. Long live Photo Mechanic! (and Nikon Capture NX2…)

Crumpler bags

Why do the women get to have all the fun with bags? It’s a true fact that the more bags you own, the more of a Man Geek you are. I own four and they’re all Crumplers. I’d say they aren’t built with the photojournalist in mind really, unlike, say, a brand like Think Tank or Lowepro, but I was after something that was comfortable, stylish enough to not scream “Photographer carrying loads of expensive gear!” but sturdy enough to look after a body or two, a few lenses and my laptop and plenty of accessories (depending on the size you go for – tip: try to see them for yourself in a shop, or order the next size up!). Moreover, they’re very comfortable to wear – the backpacks in particular are great, with a groove in the padding on the back so it always sits well over your spine. I love details like that :)

They change the particularly quirky names of their bags quite often as they introduce new designs that are usually subtly updated versions of last year’s. While that makes for a frustrating experience trying to find the bag someone recommended to you last year and has since been rebranded, they tend to stay much the same overall and you can also pick up some bargains online when retailers offload their renamed stock.

1Password

1Password is really nicely designed Mac and iPhone software that remembers all your online passwords for you – I didn’t think I had much need for this as there’s plugins for most browsers that do a similar thing but after a year of using it I’d find surfing the web considerably less slick without it.

It’s standalone software, but once installed it inserts a button into the chrome of your preferred browser (I only really use Safari or Firefox and those are supported) and whenever you’re on a page with a login field and you have those details saved in the application, clicking the 1P button will automatically fill and submit them once you enter the master password. Alternatively if you enter login information on a page it doesn’t recognise it offers to save that info for you. Therefore you only ever have to learn one password… geddit?

(Oh, and combined with Dropbox I never have to think about passwords no matter what computer I’m on!)

Graph Paper Press

See the cool template this site is running? That’s a modified version of Modularity, by Graph Paper Press (and that’s my affiliate link!). Put simply, they make damn good looking themes for WordPress, designed with photographers, film-makers and other media-based bloggers in mind, and are highly customisable from the WordPress Admin page, so you wouldn’t even have to touch an HTML/CSS/PHP editor.

There’s a selection of themes available for free, or you can sign up for a quarterly or yearly subscription which gives you a lifetime license to use the premium themes, and access to their superb support forum for as long as your sub lasts. I consider myself to be a competent amateur hacking CSS and HTML around but WordPress and PHP is a different world, and every single question I’ve posted in the forum has been completely resolved by their team within 48 hours. That’s impressive!

If you fancy getting a sub, sign up for their newsletter first as there’s often a discount code available.

Rivet

This is one of those pieces of software that just sits quietly in the background and gets on with it’s job, which is serving media files from the iMac to my Xbox 360 (I think it does the PS3 as well). I was using Connect360 but it just started getting weird with me; it kept telling me there was an update which I already had, and sometimes the control panel completely failed to start if there’d been a network disconnection.

So I tried Rivet and found it a smoother experience. For one thing it deals with folders well so I can have a more organised library view on the 360, and it also displays a thumbnail next to each file. Plus it seems to catalogue my drive quicker, which is nice.

AppZapper & Hazel

Two bits of Mac software that do exactly the same thing: help out with deleting stuff you don’t want any more.

AppZapper is brilliant: at it’s most basic you launch it, then drag your evictee application into it’s dropzone. It magically identifies all the pesky preferences, libraries and other support files and asks if you want to delete them all, then zaps them with a supercool sound effect. However, flip a switch in the top right and it changes to a filter based system that analyses your applications, widgets, preference panes and plugins for the potential to be deleted based on user-created rules.

Hazel is one of those background ‘always on’ applications. It does a whole bunch of things as well as sweeping for application support files. You can tell it to listen to certain folders and then apply housekeeping rules to the contents automatically, such as moving downloaded music files to Music, or delete all duplicate and incomplete downloads after a certain time, and there’s a whole set of rules applicable to the Trash can.

So why do I have both? Well, Hazel does all the hard work but Appzapper is pretty fun to use and it’s got a cool icon. Plus the irony of uninstalling the coolest uninstaller I ever saw would be unbearable.

Coda & Transmit

I love the Panic software company. They’re one of those small homely sorts of companies with a commitment to their products and an attention to detail that gives you a warm glow after giving up on some bloated frustrating corporate software mess. Not that this really happens much on a Mac, but perhaps that’s what they best embody: great Mac developers.

Transmit is my FTP app of choice. I like the layout of the windows and the user interface, there’s plenty of customisation available in the Preferences, and it does the job. I mainly use it to upload PhotoMechanic-exported galleries, that sort of thing. Coda is what I graduated to coding my websites with after starting out using a combination of BBEdit and CSSEdit. Looking at those two applications now I daresay you can do much of what I do in Coda using just one or other of them, but a couple of years ago you had to use both, and moving to Coda consolidated it all in one easy to use piece of software – it even automatically uploads updated files to their correct place on the server, eliminating the need for firing up Transmit. You can probably tell from the way I talk about Coda that I’m not a power user and I know I’m not pushing it nearly as hard as it wants to be pushed, but I’m just a sucker for the Panic stuff.

They make cool t-shirts too. I’ve got a Mac spinner shirt I wear at least twice a week.

Things

Things is a task-management application. There’s a version for both the iPhone and OSX. The two versions sync with each other over WiFi but are also designed to work great as standalone applications. I love it for just helping to sort out the individual stages within a large project, and also just noting unique unrelated things I need to do. It’s got a beautiful interface and you can get pretty detailed with your tasks, setting tags to filter related types of task together, adding notes and a due date, even syncing them to iCal.

I must admit I’m not exactly a power user – mind you, there are ‘Getting Things Done’ applications that have way more granular control than Things, such as Omnifocus, but Things has it just right for my level, with room to get more detailed if I want it. Ultimately, the real pleasure comes from the way it’s been designed, visually appealing and intuitive, and anything that helps soothe the frustration of having a bunch of niggling disorganised chores weighing my brain down is worth my money.

Well, that’s all folks. A bunch of stuff I use almost every day that I couldn’t live without now. Hopefully you’ll find something here you like and want to pay for, and if there’s some cool stuff that you think I’d like to know about, feel free to chip in.

Thanks for reading!

My Christmas treat to myself was to spend the evening geeking out with my Dropbox setup. It’s a free service that basically allows you to keep certain files constant across multiple machines. You create an account, download software to the machines you want to use and it creates a folder called ‘Dropbox’ on those machines. Whatever you put in the Dropbox on your computer is uploaded to the server space (where it’s secure unless you mark it ‘Public’), and is subsequently downloaded to the Dropbox folders on all the other machines you’ve set it up with, maintaining consistency no matter what machine you use.

It’s probably easier to understand if you just try it. It’s completely free, works with Macs, PCs and iPhones – sign up via my links and you’ll even get 250MB extra space on top of the standard 2GB, as will I. Plus, if you follow five of the six ‘Getting Started’ tips once you’ve signed up you get another 250MB free!

I’ll admit I wasn’t sure what to use it for at first. However, combined with the free iPhone app that accesses your server space, I found it was useful for syncing work documents like callsheets or scripts, as well as being a simple and free way to distribute large files like zip archives of photos for friends and clients.

Finally, I started using it instead of the Sites folder for storing the local copies of the code that runs my websites so that I can make edits on my iMac and be able to pick them up later on the laptop, with no effort copying the files between the two machines.

However, I felt like I was missing out on some cool uses, so I started investigating syncing the settings of regularly used applications ike Safari, iCal, Address Book, Things and 1Password, and this is how I did it.

using Dropbox to sync Macs

In all cases the iMac has the most recent and more complete files so I want to sync them to my laptop and from that point on have any changes made on either machine sync to the other. Therefore, for each application what we’re going to do is:

- find the files on your ‘master’ Mac;

- move them to the local Dropbox folder, which will subsequently copy the files to every other machine using Dropbox;

- then issue a ‘redirection’ to each application so that they can find the files in the Dropbox instead of where they ‘should’ be.

In principle, this is pretty simple. In practice you’ll usually need to use either Terminal to issue the ‘redirection’ information to your Mac’s Finder, or download a bit of software for your Mac that will issue the exact same redirection using the OSX graphical user interface you’re probably used to. I went with the latter option as Terminal scares me.

the key to syncing: Symbolic Links

This redirection information is called a Symbolic Link. What you’re basically doing is moving the settings information that the application uses, but leaving behind a signpost in the original location that points to the new location (which is in the Dropbox) so that the application can continue to read and write to those settings files. The Symbolic Link is similar to what you may know as an ‘Alias’ (especially old-school Mac users who remember System 7!) but they are significantly different and should not be considered interchangeable. Stick with Symbolic Links if you want this to work!

If you want to use the GUI Symbolic Link creation tool I mentioned above, get it here – please do take the time to have a read of the information on that page, it explains it in more depth than I did and it’s quite interesting in a geeky way.

Once you’ve installed the Dropbox software on your various machines, as well as downloaded and installed the version of the Symbolic Link tool that’s appropriate to your system, we’re ready to have a go!

syncing Safari bookmarks & history with Dropbox

Pick the machine that’s got the most up-to-date bookmarks/history and start there.

First, quit Safari – open this page in a different browser if you need it. The bookmarks and history file are kept in ~/Library/Safari (where ~ is your User folder). There’s a few other items in there too, but my understanding is that you’re going to need to move the whole Safari folder, not just the bookmarks and history .plist files.

Open two Finder windows. In one, navigate to the Safari folder as above. In the other, navigate to your Dropbox folder. Create a folder called ‘Library’ in your Dropbox. This is where we’re going to keep your Dropboxed settings for all the apps you sync up, so it helps to be organised.

The original Safari folder, moved into the Dropbox

Now move the Safari folder from it’s current location into the Library folder in your Dropbox (if your Dropbox is on an external drive, the Safari folder will copy as opposed to simply move – in this case you’ll need to delete the original once the copy is complete).

You should see the Dropbox icon in your menu bar start to work as it uploads the Safari folder to the server. At this point all your Safari settings are now in the Dropbox and if you were to launch Safari it would not be able to find them and would start over, creating an all new’Safari’ folder in the expected location. We don’t want this, so don’t launch Safari yet! We need to tell it where it’s settings are first.

Select the Safari folder in your Dropbox. Now follow the instructions for your version of the Symbolic Link tool to create a Symbolic Link to the Safari folder. It will most likely create a folder called ‘Safari symlink’, with an icon of a folder and an arrow at the bottom. This is the signpost we need. Move it out of the Dropbox folder and into the original location of the Safari folder, ~/Library.

The symbolic link, renamed and moved to the original location

If a copy of the Safari folder still remains in the original location, delete it. Rename the symlink to ‘Safari’ (without the quote marks). You should now be done for your first machine. Just to double check, launch Safari. To all intents and purposes, nothing should look different as Safari is being redirected to it’s settings via the symlink you made.

Now head to your second machine, in my case my laptop. Check your Dropbox folder on that machine and you should see your Library/Safari folder downloading from the server. Once it’s complete, follow the symlink creation instructions from above: create a symlink to the Dropboxed Safari folder and move it into ~/Library on your machine, renaming it and replacing the existing Safari folder.

Now launch Safari on that machine and if all is working well it should have all the bookmarks and even the history from your original machine. These should now also sync back and forth.

Once caveat: I don’t think it plays too nice if Safari is actively running on both machines. I haven’t tested that really, but it’s not often this happens in my situation. Either way, quitting and reloading Safari should update the software with the latest changes.

syncing iCal and Address Book with Dropbox

I was very nearly tempted to have a go with the MobileMe trial this week, mainly to have all the cool security stuff for finding or wiping my iPhone if it’s lost, but also because it would allgedly sync my iCal and Address Book between Macs. However, Dropbox offers a free way to achieve almost the same level of syncing, which will be more than enough for most casual users.

The process is exactly the same as with Safari – find the iCal and Address Book files you want to sync, move them to the Dropbox, create a symlink to each in its new location, then move the symlink back to where the original locations where the application expects to find them.

This is what my Dropbox looks like to achieve iCal and Address Book sync

I synced up my iCal calendars by moving the Calendars folder from ~/Library to Dropbox/Library on my ‘master’ computer, then creating the symlink and moving it to the ~/Library folder after renaming it from ‘Calendars symlink’ to just ‘Calendars’. Once the folder has distributed to your other Dropbox-enabled machines, repeat the symlink process on those machines.

Similarly with Address Book, move the folder named ‘AddressBook’ from ~/Library/Application Support to your Dropbox location (in my case Dropbox/Library/Application Support), create the symlink, rename it and move it to the original location. Repeat the symlink process on your other machines once the Dropboxed folder has propagated.

syncing Things with Dropbox

Things is the rather lovely ‘to-do’ software from Cultured Code, and they actually describe how to sync up multiple copies of Things using Dropbox on their wiki. However, their method uses the Terminal to make the symlink. If you’re feeling confident, go ahead and follow their instructions – you won’t mess anything up if you just type the specific codes they give you.

There is, however, another way that doesn’t require the use of any Symbolic Links at all. This is because Things handily gives you the option to tell it where the database files it needs are without the need to set up signposts using symlinks. However, we do still need to move the master database files into the Dropbox manually. First of all, remember to quit Things on the machines you’re syncing.

The path to my Dropboxed 'Things' database folder

The folder you want to move is called ‘Things’ and should be located in ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code. Now, where you chose to keep it in your Dropbox is up to you but to keep things ordered I created a new folder in Dropbox/Library called Application Support, then another new folder called Cultured Code inside that, and I moved the Things folder into there.

Redirecting 'Things' to the Dropboxed database folder

Next, fire up Things while holding the Alt key. This will bring up an option to select an existing database or start a new one. Direct Things to the location in Dropbox that you moved the database folder to, and that should be that. Now head over to your other machine, check that Dropbox has downloaded the Things folder from the server and once complete, fire up that copy of Things the same way and direct it to the Dropbox as before. Once confirmed to be working, you can go ahead and delete the original Things folders from that machine too.

Just like with Safari (and most other apps you sync this way) there can be confusion if you try running and amending multiple copies of Things at once, but that’s not much of a hassle really. Also bear in mind their comments about issues with using this to sync todo’s with iCal.

syncing 1Password with Dropbox

How you achieve this depends on what version of 1Password you’re using, I think. I’m on v3 and have moved onto their ‘Agile Keychain’ way of doing things. In this instance, all the passwords I use are kept in a file called ’1password.agilekeychain’ and were stored in ~/Library/Application Support/1Password.

However, 1Password is one application that makes it super easy to sync up with Dropbox, in that the preferences pane actually lets you not only point the application to wherever you like to find the keychain file, but will actually move it to wherever you like as well.

1Password 3's Preferences window - we'll be using the Data File section

Assuming you’re using 1Password 3, fire it up on your master machine (or whichever has the fullest 1Password keychain) and open the preferences. The very first thing you see should be the Data File options. Click on the rightmost button, ‘Move…’ and set the location in your Dropbox that you want to use. Again, for ease of use I created a file hierarchy that matched the original location – Dropbox/Library/Application Support/1Password and moved it to there.

Then on every other machine I use 1Password, I went to the same preference pane and this time clicked the ‘Choose Another…’ button, and pointed it to the freshly-downloaded 1Password.agilekeychain file that was sitting in the local Dropbox. Quit, restart, job done!

syncing other applications with Dropbox

As you can tell from the screenshots above, I’m experimenting with using Dropbox to sync a few other applications too, namely some Popcap games (Peggle Deluxe, Peggle Nights and Plants Versus Zombies). In doing so I’ve experienced a couple of situations where Peggle Nights in particular will give me the ‘application quit unexpectedly’ alert, even though I did specifically ask it to quit.

I can’t tell if this is because of my Dropbox setup or not, because it seems to do the same thing even when I put all the files back where they should be. Perhaps the game is just buggy on this hardware, because the sync does seem to be working across my Macs – save files from play time on one machine load when I fire up the game on the other machine.

Overall, a lasting caveat for all these syncs are that they can be a bit flakey if applications are run on more than one machine at the same time. If you can work around that, it’s a fantastic use for some free software, and a superb advert for purchasing an upgrade to 50GB should you need it. I’m finding that so far I’m within my limits on the free account, but if y’all would like to sign up with my link we’ll all get a bit more for free!

Cheers for reading, and have fun Dropboxing!

Obviously there’s nothing new in taking photos on a phone and other phones have many millions of photos on Flickr, but my point is that the relatively poor technical spec of the iPhone camera doesn’t make it any less popular amongst its users.

The wealth of photography apps on the Store offer a huge variety of options to the experience of taking a photo. There’s a lot of repetition though, and plenty of trash, so I’ve only ever gone for apps that were either considered the best or which appealed in some other way, such as the interface. Whatever you can think of, by this point there is almost certainly “an app for that” (grr). I’ve just had a clear-out and the core bunch that will never leave are CameraBag, QuadCamera, ToyCamera and Tiltshift Generator. I’ll look at those four today, and they’re really fantastic if you’ve not heard of them.

Three others I use a lot, not covered in this post but perhaps later, are Pano, Polarize and Snapbox. Pano and Polarize are another two keepers and I heard that the latter is about to get a big update which will hopefully fix some long-standing issues with the once-dormant app. Snapbox is one I toy with now and again but is by the same developer as Polarise so worth a mention alongside it.

I also hang on to Photogene and Best Camera. I find these apps perfectly adequate but if it wasn’t for a couple of particularly cool or useful things they did I wouldn’t miss them if I deleted them. Still, worth a look!

Finally I also have a couple of photo-related apps, Tumblr and Pixelpipe, that don’t actually process shots but are my go-to guys for uploading to blogs or Flickr, as well as another app called DropBox that I’ve been using a lot of recently for syncing iPhone photos (amongst other things) across my devices.

So I’m going to go through each one and give it a mini-review with as many screenshots as possible to let you make an informed decision about going on an App Store spending spree.

CameraBag

Website / App Store

I think this was possibly the first camera app I got on my iPhone, and it’s still easily my most used, I absolutely love it. It has 10 filters built in although two of them are a bit crap really, as you’ll see below. You load a photo by selecting it from your library or taking a new one within the app, then choose a filter to apply by swiping left or right through them. It shows you the effect and when you’re happy you save the image. There’s also a drop down menu for going directly to a filter.

Guess which two filters I’ve removed from the ‘swipe’ list? Yep, Infrared and Fisheye. Still, valiant attempt to diversify but I think they’re a bit naff. The 1964 option is a little harsh as well, creating blown highlights and huge areas of pure black, but it’s worth keeping active as it does suit some photos.

Also, I’ve disabled the ‘crop’ feature in the settings, but when it’s active it crops the Helga, Lomo and Instant filters square, crops 1974 almost square, and Cinema into a narrow 16:9 format which really doesn’t work well on vertical images. There’s also a border option and you can vary the output size of the saved images if your iPhone is struggling – like most camera apps it gobbles up memory and so like most camera apps has garnered its fair share of negative reviews on the App Store for regularly crashing if it’s been a while since you last rebooted the phone. If that happens restarting is generally necessary but the I’d have thought the iPhone 3GS would run it well – can anyone confirm that?

If you’re feeling especially creative you can reopen a saved image in order to apply another filter on top. This mechanic of multiple filters has since been done better in a few other apps which allow them to be applied on top of each other before saving, but like a classic movie this app never seems to get old and every so often an update drops a new filter in there. There’s even a desktop version now, although the Photoshopper in me is loathe to stoop to an automated processing technique for ‘proper’ photos.

Anyway, CameraBag for iPhone is brilliant.

QuadCamera

Website / App Store

This is just one of several photography apps from Takayuki Fukatsu, who runs a company called Art&Mobile. Apparently his photo apps are regularly amongst the most downloaded iPhone apps in Japan, particularly ToyCamera which I’ll come to next.

QuadCamera basically copies the likes of the Lomo Actionsampler and Oktomat cameras, which take 4 or 8 shots in quick succession and present them in one frame as a sequence. A quick look at the settings page clearly shows the options available, and also gives you a good idea of the presentation style Art&Mobile favour. As you can see it’s very un-Mac-like, which at first alienated me but it actually does the job very well and I’ve come to rather like its distinctive appearance, which also appears in his most recent app Tiltshift Generator, although not in ToyCamera.

In terms of customisation there’s a slider to alter the delay between each shot in your sequence, whether to shoot 4 or 8 shots and whether to lay them out in a row or in a 2×2 or 2×4 arrangement. There’s a selection of filters: Vivid, Bright, Dull, Hi Con, Grayscale and No Effect. If you choose the 1×4 or 1×8 options the app will lay them out vertically for landscape oriented shots, or horizontally for portrait orientation.

There’s a second menu hidden in the Settings app for the iPhone itself, where you can remove the borders or the vignette, or activate a ‘Tap Anywhere’ shutter release, and deactivate the shutter sound.

QuadCamera is unusual in that it automatically saves the result whether you like it or not. In my case this means I easily end up with a dozen different new photos in my camera roll every time I use it because once you start it’s hard to stop and even though I might not actually like any given result it gets saved regardless. It’s extremely hard not to find something interesting in pretty much every shot you get from it, though, especially with all the different filters to try.

There’s also a lot more you can try with it than just the obvious ‘train coming into a station’ type shot. I had dozens of attempts at the magazine shot below before getting it the way I wanted it! The escalator shot went through the Lolo filter in CameraBag a few times to get the glowing orange. It also makes for unusual panoramas.

There’s not a great deal else, if anything, that duplicates QuadCamera – if there is I’d like to have a look at it. If you don’t already have it, you should definitely check out this app and others from the same developer.

ToyCamera

Website / App Store

It’s another of Takayuki Fukatsu’s apps and I toyed (geddit?) with deleting it quite a few times as it was frustratingly restrictive when it came to customisation. A recent update fixed that though, and so it’s earned a permanent slot on my ‘camera app’ screen.

Vintage Green

Vintage Warm

Vintage Yellow

Low Saturation

High Saturation

Toning Sepia

Rich B&W

HiCon B&W

Original scene, no ToyCamera

ToyCamera is designed to mimic the weird colours, blur and vignetting of ‘toy cameras’ such as the plastic Holga and Lomo models. There’s plenty of other apps that offer similar effects as it’s a look that’s very much in vogue, and to that end purists should note that it’s heavily stylised, with extremely strong colour, contrast and B&W toning filters that go way beyond most photos I’ve seen produced by these cameras it’s inspired by. The flipside of this is that in terms of this look, ToyCamera is pretty much rules the roost on the App Store.

Up until recently the app used to apply the filters randomly by default, which was frustrating if the filter it chose didn’t suit the image (they really can be too much sometimes). Now, however, you can choose a specific filter to be used but only before you shoot; you can’t pick an effect to apply to a photo you already have, like you can with CameraBag for example. If you’re into the whole random ‘shoot from the hip’ ethos that the Lomographic people promote then you can activate the random mode and select which effects you’d like it to choose from.

Other settings include the standard image size settings (with a full range of sizes from 320 x 427 up to 1200 x 1600), the option to crop square and/or apply a vignette, and whether or not you’d like to upload to the Big Canvas Photoshare community. I’ve never used this as there’s just too many photo sharing communities out there for me to keep up with, but it’s there if you want it. Ideally a future update of the app would add Twitter and Facebook and all the usual suspects, which is actually something that several other apps could do with sorting out in the same vein as Best Camera has (the best example of a one-touch sharing solution – I’ll cover it in a subsequent post).

Apart from that it’s a fun little app that offers pretty much all the crazy extreme ‘toy camera’ effects you could possibly want.

Tiltshift Generator

Website / App Store

Yet another photo app from Art&Mobile, designed by Takayuki Fumatsu and Takuma Mori. It’s an example of a function that is covered by other apps in the store (such as Tiltshift – App Store), but to my tastes this is the better example, with a more pleasing effect and the same sleek interface which I liked so much in Quadcamera.

Tiltshift lenses are expensive lenses that allow you to shift the focus around by tilting the lens independently of the camera body, creating bizarre depth of field effects that trick the eye into thinking it’s looking at a miniature model of a life-size scene. It’s possible to fake the effect by applying heavy blur to a photo, leaving a strip or area sharp. Tiltshift Generator gives you this ability, as well as the option to alter the contrast, brightness and saturation, and add a vignette.

Like many other apps, you have the option to shoot a photo from within, or open one from your library. Then you select the area you want to keep sharp (or protect for blurring). In the example above I’ve used the ‘strip’ option but you can also switch to a circular selection. As you can see, there’s a central pair of thick bars, then two lighter outer bars. Inside the thicker bars stays sharp, and between that and the outer bars the blur blends in. Moving the slider adjusts how ‘quickly’ the blend occurs across the photo.

The next tab along covers the saturation, brightness and contrast controls. Finally there’s a vignette slider, and then saving and export options. Export lets you mail it out or post to Twitter.

If there is any room for improvement with Tiltshift Generator, it’s that the contrast and brightness sliders are very sensitive and it’s very easy to make a small precise adjustment and then nudge it when you remove your finger from the screen. The iPhone sensor doesn’t have the greatest dynamic range in the world so it’s all too easy to blow the hell out of the highlights, or create large chunks of sold black in the corners with the vignette – but a little tweaking can usually find a good middle ground. Also, the save size is set to 800×600 but I believe this will change in a future update.

I’ve found you don’t need to limit yourself to making traditional tiltshift photos, and have used the app to blur the corners of photos in a ‘Holga’ style, as well as to create depth of field on my 3G iPhone.

I’m a big fan of vignettes and slightly de-saturated contrasty images, so this app has seen almost as much use as CameraBag since its release. Highly recommended!

That’s all for now but plenty to get your teeth into if you’ve not heard of any. Next time, Pano, Polarize and SnapBox.

Thanks for reading!

This film is called The Golden Boy and the man calling in the favour is Danny Bishop (operating the camera on the left here), a talented camera operator with whom I worked on Reuniting The Rubins earlier this year. He’s the sort of man who inspires total confidence and trust so it’s a pleasure to work with him, and indeed at least half the crew on this short came from Rubins.

It’s a 3-day shoot, working overnight from dusk till dawn on the streets of London. On day one a lot of people will be seeing new faces, although there’ll also be a lot of people who have worked together in the past. Within each department people will generally know each other already, as that’s how everyone gets work – they’re hired by someone they’ve worked for before who liked them.

The the first thing I try to do is introduce myself to the 1st Assistant Director, the 2nd if they’re around (they’re usually back at the unit base), and any of the 3rds I can find. The 1st is running the set while the director works with the creative aspects, and on occasion I might not be able to get the shot I need due to camera position. In those cases it’s the 1st that will be able to get a scene run again just for me, so it’s essential to have a good relationship with him or her. I’ll say hi and let them know my name, find out if there’s anything I need to know already, shoot the breeze for a couple of minutes if there’s time, and then let them get on with their extremely busy job.

Then I find the camera crew and say hello to them when I get a chance, although the conversation is generally a lot shorter because they’ll be focussing very intently on their own roles tending to the camera, especially on the first day when everyone is making sure that the first shot goes off without a hitch. I’m going to be hovering very close to them a lot of the time and I need them on my side so I make a very good point of remembering names (which I’m pretty awful at these days!) and then finding somewhere safe to hide while they’re running back and forth with lenses and cables and tape measures and actors marks.

Now I get my camera set up, once I’m comfortable that people in my immediate vicinity know to expect a stills camera pointed at the action. Got to start somewhere so I’ll either make an educated guess at the settings and fire a shot off, or I’ll just fire one off with whatever I’ve already got programmed in and go from there. I’ll almost always shoot manual settings on a film because the lighting is set up to remain constant.

Here’s my first shot. It’s shot on aperture priority as that’s what my camera was on when I pulled it out the bag:

ISO 1600, f/5.6, 1/160, Cloudy

Way underexposed! The bright light in the middle is set up down the street pointing back at the actors for both fill and backlight, depending on where the actors are standing. It’s firing straight into my lens, and so aperture priority mode has screwed up his eyes and wailed “Too bright!” and produced a fast shutter. Next shot I switch to Manual mode and slow down the shutter.

ISO 1600, f/5.6 1/50, Cloudy

The shutter is now dragging too long really. At 1/50 I’ll never get frozen motion, and probably lots of camera shake, and it’s still underexposed. I’m going to have to put the ISO up past 1600 – good thing I’ve got a D700, eh? Those boards have been laid down to smooth the track on that the camera will make on the dolly (the wheeled trolley it’s attached to). Usually dolly tracks will be used, which the grooved wheels ride on, but it’s possible there wasn’t enough budget for them on this short.

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/25, Sunny

Much more light getting in now. Why did I make the shutter even slower? I’m not sure. Bit daft, really. By the way, the stand on the right is supporting the main light for this location. I’m not great with the names of lights. Let’s just say it’s a big one, and it’s got a huge softbox over it, probably about 5 feet square.

I can see that the white balance is going to have to change, probably to Tungsten, and I can now afford to pull the shutter back to something much more reasonable. Shutter first:

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/60, Sunny

That’s better. Way too warm, and still a bit bright really. 1/60 is about as slow as I’ll go on a film if a scene is relatively static and I absolutely need the light, but is still useless for freezing motion enough for my needs.

Time to switch the white balance:

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Incandescent (Tungsten)

Now we’re pretty much there. Good shutter speed, good white balance. Feels a little cold – even though I’m shooting RAW so I can tweak it all later if I have to, I’d rather get it as close as dammit right now so I don’t have to faff around later. I know that’s the luxury of RAW, but I think you can get bogged down in that and I’ll cheerfully argue the point with those that criticise not taking advantage of the post-processing freedom RAW gives you. Get it right in the camera and I can spend more time on the couch at home.

Next shot I try what I perhaps should have done in the first place – I try Auto White Balance:

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Auto WB

See, the camera thought tungsten all along. But just that tiny bit warmer, and you know I agree. However, I’m not given to trusting living in Auto settings for film stills because they can change from shot to shot given what’s in the frame, and I need consistency over a long period, so I go back to Tungsten and warm it up in-camera.

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Tungsten A5

Tungsten A5 refers to the D700′s warmer/cooler tweaks for white balance. Cooler is B1-5. It looks good to my eye and if it’s not right later, I can still always tweak. I think it’s good. So I grab a wider shot to check once more:

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Tungsten A5

It’s perhaps a bit bright – films are almost always underexposed compared to what a stills camera says is a good exposure, but I’ll wait till the actors are in the shot to see how the light plays on them. One last shot, decently framed at last!

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Tungsten A5

And now I’m ready to go! Over the course of the next two hours my settings rarely changed, except I did go up to ISO 3200 and had to move my shutter speed around from 1/80 to 1/160 depending on where the actors were. They moved around the corner of the wall and it was a lot darker on the other side, plus I felt some my shots were a bit bright overall so will bring them down around half a stop in Capture NX2 today.

Hope this was interesting reading to someone – you’ve got to start somewhere and sometimes it’s to shoot full auto and tweak those settings if they’re pretty good, other times I just work it one setting at a time, putting the ISO up only when I’m dipping into slow shutter territory.

I’ll post a few shots from the shoot once I’ve finished on it – I’m back there on Sunday night. Thanks for reading!

The Ultimate Mac Setup for Photographers is a nice collection of apps that you’re bound yo find handy when it comes to your digital workflow on your Mac. (and I nicked the image on the left from their site – credit where it’s due!)

There’s a couple of things I use that aren’t on there at all, surprisingly. First of all, in ‘Organizing and Editing’ (damn their American spellings!) they’ve tragically forgotten Photo Mechanic which to my mind is by far the best organisational tool for professional photographers. Of course, I’m biased because I don’t use Bridge, Aperture, Lightroom or iPhoto.

I’m not a fan of what iPhoto does to my filing system. I think Aperture does the same thing, I might be wrong. iPhoto’s default system is to take your photos off your memory card and store them where it wants to see them, in a folder within a folder within a folder within iPhoto’s own folder in your Pictures folder. Then if you make edits to the image it stores another copy and keeps the original untouched (good move). I don’t like this because it ties me into using iPhoto exclusively so that at least all my photos are in one place – but that’s iPhoto’s place, and if I want to use other apps, it becomes messy. Which one do I edit? Where do I save it?

And what if I have other shoots in different places but I want to start using them in iPhoto? It copies them from where they are to it’s own folder again, creating more duplicates. No, I vastly prefer to have complete control over my photos. I use iPhoto only for the occasional calendar or photobook from Apple, or to create albums of images to put on my iPhone. That’s it. I realise I can now set iPhoto to not move/copy photos to it’s own location, but that’s by the by as it’s simply a consumer tool – it might be great for you, but it’s not for me.

Photo Mechanic, which I use, doesn’t have any editing capabilities, focussing just on organisation and tagging. I ingest a whole shoot into my computer from a card using the app – it adds my IPTC info to each photo as it arrives. Then I can tag using stars (1-5) or colours; view or edit EXIF and IPTC metadata; preview full screen; move photos around the computer; batch rename; all the usual organisational stuff. It can show me previews of my RAW files almost instantly, rendering a preview JPG from the RAW data without any latent interpretation of the data by the app – the settings I shot at are what it shows me so I can make a judgement call. I can also export images to a web-gallery automatically, with a choice of several different packages – I use the SimpleViewer package almost exclusively as it’s so simple and classic. Finally, the colour or rating tags I apply can be set to be recognised by Nikon Capture NX2, my RAW developer of choice.

Which is the second big omission in my eyes. They list Lightroom, Capture One Pro and Aperture, but no Capture NX2. I know Lightroom, Capture and Aperture are the big boys with the big marketing bucks, but Capture NX2 is the only software that can do proper justice to a Nikon RAW file, in my opinion. It’s the only RAW converter I’ve used where the image I saw on the LCD is exactly what I get on the screen when I open the RAW file up. Other converters apply their own baseline values to the RAW files which necessitates setting up your own defaults that match what you thought you were shooting at the time. NX2 also gives you all the controls you’re used to on your Nikon camera, such as the Picture Control and Active D-Lighting settings. It’s also up to a useable speed on my aluminium iMac (the first of the new line of iMacs that came out a couple of years ago).

Other than that, it’s a great list with a lot of great apps in there. Have a look and see if there’s something you’re missing out on.

I walked over to Wandsworth Park and found a tiny patch of daisies – I was looking for something I could light with my new softbox (the LumiQuest Softbox III I posted about a while back). At first I just took photos of the daisies in natural light, playing with the wide angle lens I’d taken with me, the Sigma 10-20mm. I don’t often use it as it’s pretty stylised and only useful for particular things as opposed to general use so I don’t often walk around with it unless I’m specifically out on a ‘photo walk’ like this. It’s great fun every so often though, and worth remembering if you need a quick change of style.

In the rest of this post I’ll talk through the shots I took, including a few mistakes and learning points for myself.

Here’s a couple of the first shots I took while I was setting up. The difference in colour is interesting and I didn’t notice it till I got back (it was impossible to really look at the photos outside – the sun was too bright to judge the LCD properly even in the shade under the hood of my top). They were taken around 4 minutes apart, both on the Sunny white balance. In the first shot the sun had just gone behind the clouds. Both f/4 at ISO 400, the first shot is 1/400th and the second 1/2000th shutter speeds.

The sunlit one is nice but I wanted to try lighting them against the clouds so I changed my angle and set the flash up. Actually, the first thing I did was take another few shots for angles, and also I took a bunch of bracketed shots to try and make a nice HDR later. Haven’t done that yet.

This is the scene in natural light – I actually like the washed out tones and the direct sunlight, but the plan was to overpower the sun with a fast shutter. It would have been better to close the aperture too to get more focus on the foreground and also darken the ambient further but it affected the flash too much.

The shutter was already so fast that the flash was right on the edge of registering, and everything got a bit dark. Mostly I tried to keep the flash on 1/2 power maximum or else the recycle time got too long as I’d not changed the batteries since the last job I used it on.

I wanted to play with gels and white balance as well, so I could get the basics in my head. I’ve seen it used to great effect and plan to nick the idea for future use! In the first shot below, I’d switched to Tungsten white balance and put the equivalent of 3/4 CTO on. Don’t ask why I didn’t use full, it was just the first to hand! On the right you can see the localised effect of the flash on a patch of grass. Finally, there’s a shot with the flash zoomed out wider, held over the lens just as I get a helpful passer-by to give the shot some background interest.

So it’s pretty stylised, that’s for sure – but I don’t like the effect. The sky is too blown for the look I want in that last shot, it’s too blue and the foreground is too yellow. The light is also too hard and falls off at the edges too quickly (ie – the edge of the circle of light that the flash is illuminating is too obvious).

First problem easily solved – the hardness of the light; put some sort of diffuser between the subject and the light. As it so happened I’d got the Lumiquest Softbox in my bag. It’s flat, it can go everywhere. It’s very cool like that. I also switched to Fluorescent white balance and popped a green Fluorescent gel on the flash.

The first shots weren’t what I expected, as the background was nice but the flash light was much colder. Here’s a couple of test shots – technically total crap, the overall exposure too bright, no effort to hide the light and it’s evidently too powerful – but you get an idea of the temperature of the light.

On the Nikons (and I’m sure on the Canons too) you can make gradual tweaks within each WB setting. By setting Fluorescent and ‘warming up’ the setting using a -3 adjustment, the colour of the light fell much more in line with the pictures in my head.

Here’s the first decent result I got, followed by a pair that nicely show the effect of softbox out and softbox in.

I should point out that this whole set-up is far from consistent, with varying shutter speeds and f-stops, a wildly ranging distance of the flash, shooting one handed. As for notes, I’ve got the EXIF but haven’t really noted it for this post. Practically, it was opportunity to test how things work, and find something that does work. That way I’ll have done it once already should the moment arise where I need to do it on the spot somewhere, and I’ll know at least one thing that works.

These first few shots have already taught me that this white balance combination (bright sunlight, Fluorescent white balance on the camera and gel) makes for a sky colour I like, and a nicely toned ambient background. If I’m remembering the Photoshop Colour Balance tool correctly, adjusting for green introduces more magenta. Make a note in the mental crib-sheet.

The next thing I did was try to regulate the distance of the flash, and also solve the blasted CLS-in-sunlight problem. Strong direct sunlight hitting the sensor on the SB-800 can interfere with its ability to see the commander flash coming from the D200′s pop-up. I had an absolute nightmare with this issue on a portrait shoot the other day, where I was trying to put some fill on some faces but there was nowhere on that side of them to put the flash where it wasn’t in direct sunlight, hence lots of failed pops. Anyway, that’s another day, when I get permission to use the images in a post (they’re for a documentary that hasn’t aired yet).

I perched the flash and softbox on the side of my bag in such a way that the sensor was shaded and the flash was directed at my willing models. Here’s another few in a portrait orientation. Even though the flash is pretty much fixed now you can still see a variation in exposure as I kept adjusting shutter speeds and aperture trying to get the clouds the way I wanted them. I really need to sort out captions for my images so I can put the EXIF in there.

L: 1/1250 sec, f/5.6
M: 1/1250 sec, f/4
R: 1/1600 sec, f/5.6

If nothing else, this demonstrates how changing the aperture changes the ambient and the flash (shutter speed generally only affecting the ambient, non-Strobists amongst you). The final shot is much darker because both the shutter speed and the aperture got cranked up. It’s also interesting how the colour of the last shot appears to change.

I’ve just worked out while writing that paragraph that it’s because the ambient (magenta-ish) light has been far more effectively cut out of the frame, meaning the lit area is more ‘regular’ because of the correctly gelled flash. Looking at them now I prefer the first one for the subtle tint, but possibly a bit brighter. Och, details, I’m sure I’m the only one that even noticed it.

I grabbed a whole bunch more but they really aren’t all that interesting to view, being mostly variations in framing. In the end I came up with a couple that I really liked, both of them pretty similar but one off to a slant. The straight one is in fact the first image in this post, back at the top. My fave, though, is this next one, because I like how the slant pulls the Y-shaped daisy formation into the corner and gives it a bit of energy, and I like how the trees tail off in a curve at the top. And I like the light!

And finally, there’s a shot of me holding the flash in frame so you can see how it’s set up. Really complicated high budget stuff.

Lessons learned:

1) As if I didn’t already know, waiting for a change in the light will change the whole tone of a photo.

2) In sunlight a change to Fluorescent WB with a green gel on the flash can give a subtle surreal warm tone to ambient light and backgrounds. Could be useful for giving an outdoor portrait a little something extra, in-camera.

3) The green fluorescent gel needs warming up a little in the white balance settings.

4) Working out some sort of stable and ideally adjustable stand or support for the flash and softbox would be really useful, allowing for an extra level of control I very much lacked this time out.

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

Then you set the prices for every conceivable permutation of print, select which photos you don’t want to sell for any reason, and you’re done. Fotomoto take 15% of any sale, and you automatically get sent a cheque every time you accumulate over $200 in profit (although if you haven’t made that much you can still request an early payment). The toolbar also allows people to send e-cards of any image for free. Finally, it tracks what images have been bought as prints or sent as e-cards, which you can check out when you log into their site.

All in all, there doesn’t seem to be a downside really, as it’s a completely free service to sign up to with Fotomoto’s 15% commission only being taken when you actually make a sale. Hopefully it will stay that way – although there’s a slightly ambiguous line in the Quick Start documentation:

Thereʼs no subscription fee for using the beta version of Fotomoto. This means that adding Fotomoto to your site is free!

Will they start to charge a subscription fee once it’s out of beta?

The only other caveat is that they currently only accept US Dollars and the printing service they use is in North California. At present I’m not sure what the standard delivery charges are around the world* so that might discourage UK or EU customers – although they can always just get in touch directly and I can order from my UK printer.

Having said that, according to the Mint statistics for my site currently 26.45% of my visitors are from the US and 16.29% are from good old Blighty, so I suppose it makes financial sense to appeal to the largest market…

Anyway, to celebrate the incredible ease of buying a print I’m offering 50% off all prints for the next month – just use this code at the checkout: 0A0D5C

Enjoy!

• UPDATE: I’ve just checked out the ordering process for myself and for a limited time Fotomoto are doing free delivery to the UK – so get yourself a bargain!

I changed over to the latest version of SlideShowPro, which runs the galleries and slideshows at my portfolio site, and added their latest bit of coolness, the thumbgrid. It’s fully editable and hovering over it scrolls it up or down and the thumbs pop out at you and it’s all very pleasing.

I also added a few more links to cool App Store goodies I’ve been playing with recently. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Basically, versatility and portability!

For a long time I’ve wanted to have the confidence to walk up to strangers and ask permission to shoot a portrait of them, totally for free, just because I think they look very photogenic. Missed lots of potential opportunities that way, so I decided to take the Softbox out for a walk along Putney Embankment last week. It was a sunny afternoon and I told myself the worst that could happen was people I asked said “No.” and that’s fine because there’s loads of other people to ask.

As it happens, everybody I asked said “Yes.”, but I was pretty selective, and I didn’t ask that many people in the end – the thing is I seemed to have chosen the time of day that a lot of mothers were out taking their babies and children for walks, and I didn’t want to bother them! And there were a lot of joggers out too and I thought leaping into their path with a huge camera and flash might put them off their pace.

I’d done some test shots first (since deleted, should have kept them to give you a laugh). I kept the SB-800 on 1/4 power, triggered via CLS from the D200, which was in manual at ISO 100, around f/4 on average (to give my auto-focus a bit of a chance), and whatever shutter speed got the background roughly one stop underexposed.

Getting started

The first target in my sights was a gentleman by Putney Bridge recording some footage for a film he’s making. We got chatting about what he was filming, then about cameras after I told him about the softbox. The first shot I took was to meter for the ambient light, getting the sky I wanted. I just framed up and shot, didn’t bother focussing. Then I brought the softbox up to camera left, pretty much arms length.

At this point I had a 1/4 CTO gel on the flash and was shooting Sunny. I decided he was just a bit too warm, and took it off. I also thought it looked a bit too ‘lit’, what with a lot of the background being in shadow and giving it a bit too much contrast to his face. We turned around to frame the bridge in the background and shot this next one.

Thing is, I think I should have left the gel on! Either that or switched to Cloudy white balance or warmed the Sunny one up to -2 or -3 on the camera (Nikon terminology, not sure what it’s called on Canon). It’ll make a great B&W and if I did want to warm it, it’s a simple job to apply a filter or curve in Photoshop, but I wanted to post ‘straight out the camera’ shots for this post.

I gave my portraitee a card with my contact details in case he wanted to email me for a copy later, and went for a walk along the river. The next people I approached were a couple coming my way.

I wasn’t actually sure if this shot had worked out at the time because the sunlight was so strong it was tricky to see the LCD properly, but I liked the result once I saw it on screen at home. I think it’s on the verge of being too much in shadow on the right but the detail is there, so I got away with that! I asked his girlfriend if she would like one too, or one of them together, but I’d not thought about how it would work with the comparatively small light source and two people in a portrait situation – would the drop off be too much to light both of them? It turns out by bringing it around towards me a little, closer to the axis, there’s more than enough power to light them.

I’d also had the benefit of a sliver on sunlight coming in from back right getting a bit of his hair and his neck and jawline, which I hadn’t thought of before and only noticed when I got home. In the top photo, the sun is camera left, as is the flash, so while I’m underexposing the ambient light for the background, I’m bringing his already shadowed face even more into shadow.

The next few shots were of a group of people walking together. They were foreign but I never asked from where (shamefully – I was a bit too nervous about not seeming like one of those people selling portraits on the street!), so I explained to them that I just wanted to practice and it was totally for free – I took an unlit shot again, both for checking the background and for reference later.

Again with the cold skin tones! I think I’m still in Sunny at this point. I like it but it’s a bit underlit on his face – I was bringing the light into the shot and then backing it out till just out of frame. I think this is an example of not aiming it properly at his face.

With the girls I tried lowering the position of the light a little, rather than it being just above eye level. The effect is more noticeable in the left hand shot, but for me with these what’s really not working is the lack of a back light or fill, which is because I’d positioned them totally in shadow as you can see from the first shot of the man.

That was because I’d been wanting to make sure the D200 pop-up flash was triggering the infra-red sensor on the SB-800, as opposed to any creative reasons! When I was testing on myself I was in direct sunlight and there were a lot of mis-fires. It works a lot better in shadow. You can see the full extent of what the softbox is throwing at them, but it’s taught me to remember considering the sun as fill when positioning a portrait like this.

My next subjects had absolutely no say whatsoever in whether I shot them:

Clockwise from top left – no flash; flash high camera left (creeping into frame actually); flash further out of frame by a few inches (too far, really); flash closer but coming from under the arm. I like the last shot – obviously it’s too close and too far under the arm, but varying the position of the softbox definitely produces different enough results. With someone else holding it if you don’t have a stand with you, you could definitely make some strikingly different looks with this one light. I might even ask them to hold it themselves and see what I get.

My last willing ‘volunteer’ was a young woman reading in Bishops Park on the other side of Putney Bridge. At this point the wind was blowing enough to whip her hair around her face but we got one good shot that wasn’t too crazy!

I think it’s a little underexposed overall – I should have opened up the aperture if possible, or slowed the shutter and brought the light a little closer, but as before it was impossible to see the LCD at the time. Lifting the levels in Photoshop will work great for it. The fill from the sun on the right of her face works though!

All done!

And that was the end of the day for me – I walked back and didn’t see anyone else that looked like they might be up for it, and the closer I got to home the more the confidence to ask slipped away from me anyway, but I was pleased with what I learnt.

The shots I got varied a fair bit in level of exposure, because the real trick, it turns out, is getting the position of the handheld softbox right – as I was keeping the settings of the camera and flash power pretty much the same, the biggest control over the power of the light against the ambient comes from how close the light is to the subject.

I also noticed I wasn’t getting much variety in composition and frame size as I’m limited to an arm’s length from everyone and only have one hand left for holding the heavy camera and lens – need to build those forearms up! If I had the flash and softbox on a lightweight stand or someone else was holding it I’d have much more flexibility, but that’s for another day.

Lessons learned:

1) Get the warmth of the light right – either a gel or warm up the overall image in the camera

2) Make sure I’m directing the light at their face correctly

3) Bear in mind the position of the sun as a fill or backlight

4) Stay in the daylight to avoid too contrasty a look with heavy shadows on one side

And now I’ve done it once, there shouldn’t be anything stopping me going out and doing it again next time there’s a good weather day for it!