photography

iPhoneography Insights: No Focus

When I came upon this puddle there wasn’t anything too special about it. But the sun had just set, and I liked the colors in the sky.

In this post I’ll show you how I used Mextures to take the colors up a notch and create a surreal result.

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I took a few photos and didn’t review them on the spot since I was in a rush. Out of all the photos taken, I actually liked this one even though it’s out of focus. That’s where I got the title after all. 😉

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I applied the “Dusk” gradient to both the top and bottom of the image. Notice the different orientations in the screenshot on the right.

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After exporting from Mextures, I reduced the noise using the “Smooth” feature in Pixlr. Too much smoothing can ruin an image, but, since this one is out of focus, it worked out really well. Lastly, I finished it off with a preset from VSCO Cam that really brought out the purple.

Check out more iPhoneography Insights here.

And don’t forget to follow me on Instagram!

iPhoneography Insights: Wispy

As you can tell from the title, the wispiness of the clouds definitely made this photo a great capture. But I wanted to take this opportunity to have a little more fun with it and give you a brief demonstration of how I use one of my favorite apps — Mextures.

According to the app’s description, Mextures is the best app for applying film grain, textures, light leaks, and beautiful gradients to your images in seconds.

I waited for the sun to reach the horizon.

I waited for the sun to reach the horizon.

As you’ll see in the screenshot below,  the first gradient I used amplifies the warmth of the sky. The second gradient was used to add more color to it.

One of the awesome features of the app is that it allows you to perform non-destructive edits, i.e., you can go back and change how strong/soft you want the gradient to be.

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After editing the photo in Mextures, I put the finishing touches using a filter in VSCO Cam.

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View the apps in iTunes:

Check out more iPhoneography Insights here.

And don’t forget to follow me on Instagram!

Film Rekindled: It’s An Event

This post was inspired by a question from a fellow enthusiast.

https://twitter.com/techminimalist/status/562741164181561345

As I was typing my response, I realized that I haven’t done this type of introspection since the eighth month mark. Even though it’s a good list, I wanted to go deeper since all of the bullet points are part of a larger reason why film is special to me.

To briefly expand on the four points:

  • It’s meditative because I have to make each shot count.
  • I shoot less than digital because there’s a tangible cost to each shot, which further magnifies the need to make each one count.
  • Chimping in photography means reviewing the photo right after you take it, which isn’t possible with film. This adds to the meditative aspect; I’m forced to focus on the present.
  • I enjoy that I don’t have to do any processing. Just drop the film off at the lab and look forward to seeing the results.

If you’re thinking you can do these four things with digital, you’re right. But the key distinction is that it’s a simulation, especially with the last two.

With film, I don’t have a choice. I can’t immediately see the photos I take. I can’t change the look of a film.

This is not film versus digital. This is a case for film photography. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

For me, it’s something that I schedule. Something that is refreshing. Something that I look forward to. It becomes an event.

This quote comes to mind:

At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

– Maya Angelou

I’m sure Maya wasn’t referring to film photography. But the parallel is there. When I think back on my outings with my film camera, I often don’t remember the settings (e.g., aperture and shutter speed) I used. Instead, I remember how much I enjoyed walking around in search of a great photo and feeling inspired to create.

Do you shoot only film or digital, or both? And is it an event for you? Let me know in the comments.

And check out more from Film Rekinded here.

iPhoneography Insights: Line Break

Whenever I do a colorsplash, or selective coloring, it most often involves a car and its tail lights.

They’re fun to make stand out. Plus, I love red. But this time around, yellow caught my eye. I’ll show you how I used VSCO Cam and Pixlr to create the Line Break.

Straight out of the camera.

Pixlr is usually step one when I’m doing a colorsplash. The feature inside the app is actually called just that, Splash. Sometimes the app will be able to do most of the work for you (i.e. you select a yellow spot and everything that’s not yellow becomes monochrome). Other times, you’ll have to use brush and erase to make your selection because the app can’t distinguish correctly.

To finish it off, I picked a preset from VSCO Cam that added more contrast and mood. It was one from the “Street Etiquette” pack if I remember correctly.

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View the apps in iTunes:

Check out more iPhoneography Insights here.

And don’t forget to follow me on Instagram!

Photo-essay: Creative Feast at the Ogden

Despite being a native New Orleanian, I’ve never been to the Ogden Museum. It was the last day for a PhotoNOLA exhibition called Self Processing: Instant Photography. And although I was eager to see the instant photographs and cameras, the museum itself provided a creative feast both outside and in.

This is the renowned ‘Before I die’ wall, where visitors may express something from their bucket list. Fortunately, the rain from the day before left a puddle.

Red.

Going up.

Frame in frame, rectangles, and squares.

Silhouette and shadow.

This is where admission stickers go when you leave.

iPhoneography Insights: Brick Road

For this post, I decided to give a little more detail than the previous ones in this project. Most of the time, I don’t know beforehand whether or not I want to write a post about the post-processing of a certain photo.

But, if I’m able to decide before or while I’m editing, it’s easy for me to get some screenshots and upload it to my OneDrive for this.

Here’s the original photo of a hallway at my local library.

I purposefully composed to have the lines of the brick wall meet the two corners because I’d imagined a brick road. Not yellow bricks, but it’ll do. First, I opened the image in SKRWT where I did most of the transformation.

Using the ratio tool, I compressed the image horizontally so both corners of the brick wall would still be in the square crop. This tool does a good job of compressing images in order to fit things in a different aspect ratio.

After exporting from SKRWT (image on the left), I used the heal tool in Pixlr to remove a lot of the distractions on the right side of the brick road. To finish it off, I applied a black and white preset from my favorite and most-used app (in 2014 at least), VSCO Cam. I think the black and white really brings focus to the window light and makes the result more surreal.

View the apps in iTunes:

Check out more iPhoneography Insights here.

And don’t forget to follow me on Instagram!

Film Rekindled: Highlights From My Eighth Roll

I forgot how a random roll of Kodak Ultramax 400 snuck into my Fuji Superia streak, but it did. This one’s a little special because I thought I’d lost it until I found it while doing some cleaning.

https://twitter.com/techminimalist/status/542342602302181376

On my last roll, I moved away from recording photo settings in order to avoid missing moments. I continued that with this one, but I also began making an effort to record them again recently. Instead of entering the metadata directly into my spreadsheet on Google Drive, I now record them quickly in a notes app and transfer them later. So look for apertures and shutter speeds in later posts.

For now, enjoy these photos from downtown New Orleans and a neighborhood called The Marigny.

Gear used:

Check out more from Film Rekinded here.

iPhoneography Insights: Not the Louvre

I was grabbing a coffee at Starbucks recently and I noticed their app pick of the week, Juxtaposer — an app that had been on my iTunes wishlist for a while.

Juxtaposer lets you combine multiple pictures into creative and fun photomontages quickly and easily thanks to its intuitive and responsive user interface. 

– Pocket Pixels Inc.

I happily grabbed a card on the counter, entered the promo code in the App Store, and immediately began using the app.

These are the two photos that I’d decided to work with after combing through my library for a couple of minutes. The aim was for one photo to provide a clean background and the other a subject to place onto the background. Juxtaposer made it pretty easy to extract the building by zooming in on the photo as I was selecting which part to extract, although some sort of line tool would definitely have been helpful in this situation. I finished it off in VCSO Cam with a black and white preset.

View the apps in iTunes:

Check out more iPhoneography Insights here.

And don’t forget to follow me on Instagram!