As is obviously apparent, I’ve been using this site, this blog rather, to experiment with a new way of working with photographs. Well, new to me that is. By working with the iPhone I found that I can take a picture, edit it in Photoshop write a short blog post and publish the blog with the photograph all within a few minutes. All from the phone. No matter where I am in Canada.
A couple of things make this possible. One, the camera in the phone is actually quite good enough for posting images to a blog. I probably wouldn’t print these at any large size, but it is my intention eventually to print them at small sizes in a book form. The second thing that makes this possible, is that there are a number of applications available for the iPhone that make it fairly easy to edit or apply special effects to an image that will take what would normally be a fairly flat image and make it an interesting one. the third thing that makes this possible is the fact that I have a data plan that allows me to upload up to 6 GB of data per month, an amount that is effectively unlimited. I have yet to use even 1 GB in a month and that is without paying any attention at all to the amount of data actually use.
Right now I use a combination of three or four apps each time. I have two camera apps, one that is the one that was provided by Apple, the second one takes advantage of the accelerometers in the phone to wait until I’m holding the phone steady before it takes a picture; kind of like an image stabilizer. I use Photoshop to do any image tweaking. And I have a couple of other apps that I use if I want to use a special effect.
After an initial flurry of putting quite a lot of images up, I have slowed down a little bit because I’m so busy right now and my life is so regimented that if I’m not careful, I’ll put up a lot of images that repeat in its subject matter. For instance right now I have quite a few that are taken on the platform at Union Station. For some reason as well I almost always take photographs during conditions that are not really optimal for the camera that’s built into the iPhone.