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The evening my sister and I were in NYC, we both decided to take some pictures with our iPhones before we caught the train back to NJ.  We downloaded a newish app called Camera Awesome. It’s free, and it’s very cool. If you don’t have it, go download it and try it out. More on that below. These pictures were taken with my iPhone and a small add-on lens that I bought while at MacWorld. It’s called an Olloclip. It’s a three-in-one lens that includes a fisheye (which I used for these photos), a macro, and a wide angle. While the macro works well, I find it’s a pain to use because you need to screw off the wide angle lens to access it. With everything being so small, I’m fairly certain that I would misplace it in a nano-second. Thus, I keep the wide angle screwed on at all times. The Olloclip fits both the iPhone 4 and 4s, and it’s a lot of fun to use.

I’ll put up some pictures that I took with the Olloclip while in San Francisco. Some, especially those I took shooting through the window on the airplane while flying back home, are very cool.

I like the effect. It’s very snow globe looking.

Camera Awesome has many very cool features. It’s hard to believe the app is free. It’s made by the folks who give you SmugMug so it also gives you the ability to upload to that service as well as other social media sites. It has many useful features (editing tools, filters, image stabilization, a timer, sharing tools).  My favorite feature, however, is the ability to set a focus point and a metering point. Nice! The top left photo is taken with the iPhone camera, and the lights are blown out (yes, I know the lights are blown out on some of the fish eye photos). The photo on the right was taken with Camera Awesome and the wide angle Ottoclip lens; I moved the metering point near the lights while setting the focus on the Empire State Building. I wanted to experiment more, but we had a train to catch and we had to be fast.

This is the construction work going on at Madison Square Garden and Penn Station.
 

These shots of the Empire State Building and the New Yorker hotel were processed on my iPad. The above shows the original and two images of each made by using a couple filters. The differences are subtle, but it was fun playing. The power of many camera apps (and art apps) is mind-boggling. I still use Photoshop daily for work and large scale digital paintings, but I’m using it less and less for processing photos. I find myself wondering what will happen with Photoshop in the future. I’ve been using it for nearly two decades so I am extremely comfortable with it. However, it’s a program that presents new users with quite a learning curve (and price tag). I suspect many will stop using it and even Elements because the types of things it is often used for — resizing, editing, special effects — can be easily done for far less money.  And did you see iPhoto for the iPad that was announced today? Wow!  For $4.95?? That app is sweet!  And, how exciting, new iPad on the 16th!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2012 at 12:51 am and is filed under photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.