Mobile Photography - final thoughts

The best camera is the one that you always have on you. Nicer, more expensive cameras may take higher-quality shots, but if you can capture everything you see with the phone in your pocket, your iPhone may be a better camera overall. With the success of third party apps and the App Store, the iPhone has become the center of a world of mobile photography. Flickr, and other similar sites, now say that the most popular camera used to upload photos to its site is the iPhone. It's so simple to whip our your phone (that you're probably already texting on) to snap a quick photo of whatever is in front of you.

Most of my photo experience comes from a 20+ year old Canon film camera passed to me from my dad. I own a great set of lenses and love using the camera but don't find time to work with it while in college. I recently considered investing in a high-quality DSLR, but I decided that I couldn't justify spending that much money on a camera when I already have a phone with two cameras and thousands of available photo apps that cost a buck or two. There are so many apps that do almost anything you can dream about doing with photographs on your phone. Looking at the iTunes App Store photography section, there currently are more than 4423 paid applications listed for sale (and thousands more free ones).

In my previous blog posts, I discussed five mobile photography applications that I love using on my iPhone. With these apps (for which I only paid $4 combined), I can produce so many fantastic images right on my phone, whereas I could spend hundreds of dollars on a DSLR and more on a professional editing program such as Aperture. The camera of the future is the smartphone, as people are buying them up in masses. With the increasing number of smartphones being sold, developers are developing better and better applications to suit every user's needs. The low starting point for app price (99 cents) means that people will buy tons of apps since they're so inexpensive. It is predicted that mobile application marketplaces will account for $3.9 billion in revenue in 2011, with the Apple App Store grossing 76% of that with $2.91 billion.

Mobile photography is more than just photography - it encompasses an entire ecosystem of hardware, software, and creativity. I have always loved photography for the artistic aspect, which led me to pursue black and white film photography in high school. Now, with little time to work in dark rooms and not enough money to purchase a new camera, I use what I have to continue pursuing my passion. I find myself firing up apps on my phone all the time to take quick shots when I'm out with my friends. I love how fast and easy it is for me to take a picture then go back to what I was doing. Or, if I have more time, I'll use some of the filtering or editing apps to spice up previous photos. I find it funny that I never open up the standard camera app on my phone anymore - the more artsy ones like Hipstamatic are what I go for almost exclusively.

As technology evolves, so does photography. What used to be a time-consuming hobby transformed with the digital world and has become something that anyone can do with relatively inexpensive hardware. I'm excited to see the future of hardware and software - apps are what currently drive the marketplace and look to continue this trend in the future.

For now, I'll leave you with a quick shot I took visiting my friend's dorm recently - I'm not sure I agree with the card, but I couldn't resist snapping a photo with Hipstamatic.

Photosynth - instant panoramas

Photosynth is a panorama creation app from Microsoft that puts together spectacular images right on your iPhone. The app stitches together as many photos as you take in any direction (including up and down) and gives you an instant, interactive panorama. Taking photos is easy - you take the first then move in any direction and the app automatically takes another photo, lined up with the first. You can spin in a circle and do this to produce a 360 degree shot in less than a minute.

Once you decide to stop taking photos, Photosynth uses on-device processing to stitch the images together and create one photograph. When you view your previously taken shots, you can use your finger to move around in the world like you are standing right where the panorama was taken. The feeling of being able to look left, right, up, and down makes me think of Google Street View, where you can do the exact same thing. Thinking about it, Google Street View must use a very similar technology to create interactive images of all the streets in the country.

It astounds me that the iPhone that fits in my pocket is capable of putting together photographs to create interactive panoramas. In high school we would always have big panoramic pictures taken our of classes, but they had to use special, most likely expensive cameras to do so. Now, I can pull out my phone and do it on the fly. Most point and shoots and DSLRs can't even do this. Mobile photography has its limitations, but there are also many ways in which it exceeds traditional photography. Photosynth shines as a great example of the capabilities of mobile photography.

Color Splash - iPhone finger painting

Color Splash lets you convert your photos to black and white while keeping objects you choose in color. This gives your photos a dramatic look and creates striking images by drawing the viewers' attention to the colored areas. A nice contrast is made by selectively turning your image into some colored areas and other black and white areas. This app takes longer to learn and master than others, but it lets you make amazing photographs right on your phone. I put in a little time to figure things out and can now quickly turn a photo around with this app. Here are images that I have created using Color Splash.

The app uses the touchscreen in a very intuitive way - you use your finger to paint over parts that you want to keep in color. The method reminds me of the finger painting I did as a young child. While this may seem like a crude method, you can zoom in on photos and get details down to the pixel if you want to.

What's more, Color Splash makes it easy to differentiate between what you have painted with your finger and what you have left black and white by changing the colored portion red. This helps with dark photos that contain color but don't contain sharp edges. The app also lets you have multiple projects going at the same time, so you can work on a photo then come back to it later to touch it up at your convenience. Most other mobile photography apps only allow you to work with one photo at a time, so Color Splash gets this part right and means you can work at your own speed, whether or not you'll finish in the time you have available.

When I first got my iPhone, Color Splash caught my eye with the sample images that it was marketed with, and it hasn't disappointed me at all. I love showing friends the photos that I create, and they are always amazed that I produce them solely on my phone. Like FX Photo Studio, this app always creative photographers to do so much on the go without the need for a computer. Of course, professional photo editing programs have the ability to do what app more, but I doubt any of them are as simple, convenient, and intuitive as Color Splash.

FX Photo Studio - mobile image editor

FX Photo Studio is a much more full-featured image editor than the previous two photo apps I have discussed. The app, which can either take photos from the device camera or load from the photo library, allows you to crop, change contrast, rotate, and perform other elementary photo editing processes right on your iPhone. What it does best is offer hundreds of photo manipulations that filter your photos, provide borders, or do other tasks to improve your images.

FX Photo Studio is what I'll run if I want to work with photos that I already have in my library. The app offers hundreds of different effects to apply to your photos, and it can be tough work going through them all and previewing your photo. What I love doing is hitting the "random" button and letting the app choose effects by itself. It takes multiple attempts, usually, but in this way I have produced really great photos. Below is one of my favorite images that I have created in FX Photo Studio.

The app does well to give the user so many effects to use to manipulate their photos and quickly share them by the countless ways an iPhone can share photographs. Full-featured image editors on computers are expensive, difficult to learn, time-consuming, and require you to be at your desk. Apps such as this and mobile photography, as a whole, allow you to do all of this wherever you can take your iPhone. Some people may criticize FX Photo Studio for not containing enough content to make it a worthwhile place to edit photos, but considering the limitations of the hardware, I think the app does a great job providing a convenient way to work with photos on the go.

Instagram - photo filters with friends

Similar to Hipstamatic in end product, Instagram is another iPhone photo app that lets you apply filters to create unique images. You are offered a choice of filters after you take a photo, and you can look through them all until you find the one you want to add. With this process, taking a quick succession of photos with the app is not possible, but you can create great images that have the same retro feeling as Hipstamatic. Instagram takes more time to reach the end product after a picture is taken, but it offers you more choice and previews of every photo with different filters, which some people may like. Here are some photos that I have taken with Instagram.

What really sets Instagram apart from other mobile photography apps is the addition of profiles and friends. When you launch the app, you create a user profile and have the ability to "friend" other users, creating relationships similar to Facebook friends or Twitter followers. Then, whenever you launch the app, the first screen that comes up has a feed of all your friends' photos and descriptions or locations that they added. Doing this adds a social aspect to photography, which really sets this app apart from others. Mobile photography isn't just about taking photos to have for yourself, but it allows you to share what you're capturing with others and lets you see what your friends find interesting. Social networking and media have become essential to the lives of young Americans, and it's no coincidence that social photography has also become big.

Besides seeing your friends' photos, Instagram offers a cool feature that lets you view the most popular Instagram photos from across the world. You can search through pages and pages of amazing, beautiful photos taken with the app. When I take the moment to look through these, I am always shocked at the quality of photographs that people have taken. It really goes to show that even the iPhone, with an inferior camera, can produce images that rival professional cameras at first glance. Instagram is a great example of mobile photography that pulls in a large base of users by being free then creates its own social network of photographers who want to share what they capture.

Hipstamatic - a retro camera for the future

One of my favorite iPhone apps is Hipstamatic - an app that turns your decent iPhone camera into a retro camera with tons of options. Instead of using the standard photo application that comes on the iPhone, I find myself starting up Hipstamatic more often than not to shoot photos on a whim. The app aims to return to a more analog world of photography where things are unpredictable and often come out much different than you would expect.

On startup, you see the "front" of your Hipstamatic camera, showing you which lens you currently have equipped. The "camera" has a look of a plastic toy camera of the past. If you swipe left and right on the lens, you can switch between a bunch of cool, retro lenses that all produce different effects. You can also switch the type of film you are using (producing different borders on your pictures) and you can change the camera body to other plastic-looking colors.

When you flip to the back, you see a small viewfinder, a flash charge-up slider, and a big yellow button to take photos. With all the options (and additional items available for purchase), Hipstamatic gives users so many ways to express themselves through photos. The countless number of combinations of lenses, film, and flashes will let users explore the app to find the type of photo that they truly love. Personally, I have found a setting that I use as a default, and I think it makes all my photos look much better than standard ones. What follows is four of the images I have taken with Hipstamatic.

What gives this app the edge is it's ease of use and its customizability. I bought the app for under two dollars and have so many options to make my photos more artsy and retro. What's more, when you take a photo, the app adds the filter right away so you don't have to worry about choosing that after. You can snap away a bunch of photos in a row and not be burdened with filter selection like competing apps have.

When compared to the standard iPhone application, this app creates photos that are much more appealing to the eye. Even compared to nicer digital cameras and DSLRs, Hipstamatic turns your iPhone into something that creates art - not just photographs. I love using the app and having great photos right away. With a nicer digital camera, I could take photos then edit them and apply filters with my computer, but that requires so much more time and effort. With mobile photography, I can take these photos then immediately share them via email, Facebook, Twitter, and other options. Hipstamatic is a quirky app that transforms your iPhone into a retro photo shooting machine.