Vintage Camera Fans – Hipstamatic updated with sharing

I have mentioned Hipstamatic a few times both for the app’s features as well how other camera apps compare.

Hipstamatic gives the user experience of pairing old film types and a variety of lenses to create iPhone images to resemble vintage cameras. New in this update, 220, Hipstamatic moves from all vintage to sharing across modern social networks.

From the back of the Hipstamatic app, choose the film area in the lower left corner to get to your photographs. Notice the buttons and icons across the bottom to access the new features.

Tapping any image still gives the information about the Hipstamatic lens/film used to create the photo. As well, scrolling down on the right gives the many options to share through social sites, print and emailing.

Hipstamatic 220 update: Family Album: Share your Adventures in Hipstaland
• Create a Shared Album with friends to have instant access to each others HipstaPrints
• Create Magic Albums which automatically fill themselves with HipstaPrints of people, places, and things
• Create Photo Albums of your favorite HipstaPrints

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iPhone photos with depth of field beyond TiltShift

One of the best/easiest way to give a feeling of depth in a picture is to have a part in focus and other parts out of focus. A person’s mind says that they are focusing on a point and everything else must be further away cause it is out of focus.

A common tool to use to get the effect in an image is called TiltShift. A popular use of TiltShift being applied to an image is to make a scene more toy like.

The ease of use makes it a quick option on a smaller screen like the iPhone. The negative is that the area method to choose the part of an image being ‘in focus’ is either a straight line or a circle. Which works fine when dealing with a picture that has a small town in a large open area. This doesn’t work very well if you have something like a flower that isn’t perfectly round.

There is a new app available for the iPhone does more than make parts of an image blurry. SynthCam actually does a whole of lot of math to accomplish the effect… the end result is that everything at a particular distance is in focus and things outside of that depth is blurred. So, an item with complicated edges like a flower will have it’s petals in focus and the areas between the petals will appear further away.

Because SynthCam has to have information beyond a photo to know what is at the same depth and what is further away, to work you have to take the image with SynthCam.

Using SynthCam, you tell the app what is the item (the depth) you want to be in focus. Moving your iPhone just a bit from left/right, then up/down and then hit the done button. In the background, the app takes many images per second to know what it should show in focus and what not to.

SynthCam works in landscape and portrait views. Moving the iPhone around a bit to allow the app to know what to leave in focus does take a little practice. There is an option to choose multiple points in case the level to keep in focus is in different areas that you wouldn’t be able to cover in the small movements of the iPhone. Creating images with your iPhone that would normally take an adjustable mechanical lens.

Classic Camera Effects for your iPhone photos

As the resolution on the iPhone camera goes up, more and more apps let us tune those photos down to look like those taken with yesteryear cameras. Many of these apps apply the filters at the time of taking the photo with delays… creating a mood around the capturing of the image. You set up the app to mimic a particular camera/film combination then take the picture. Hipstamatic is one very popular app, taking a low resolution looking image to use across the many social photo networks.

An app I started playing with goes the other direction. Lo-Mob gives you the ability to add 39 different vintage camera effects to your iPhone photos. Upon taking a photo or importing through your iPhone Photo Library, you are presented with thumbnail images of the different filters applied to that image. Unlike most of the other ‘classic camera’ apps, not all of the images are square, there are wide and tall layouts too.

If one of the default vintage effects doesn’t match the exact needs of your image. Lo-Mob allows the filtered image to be tuned. The controls are easy to use buttons across the bottom of the image area for coloring, frames and vignetting. Some photo sharing services require a square image so keep that in mind if you are tuning within the tall or wide Lo-Mob layouts.

When the image is as old as you want it to be, sharing can be done directly from Lo-Mob to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and email.

If you enjoy taking images and sharing with others through Lo-Mob, there is a Flickr page and a Lo-Mob iPhone Flickr page.

Fine Tuning iPhone Time Lapse Photography

I mentioned earlier that I have long been playing with the iPhone still photography and now stepping into the video world. Video isn’t actually new to me, being a movie producer, but doing the recording on my own with an iPhone is a new bit of fun for me.

Time Lapse photography, which is really “movies” has been an area I have seen some real opportunity to be creative with. Many ideas and as many software options. I wont go through the list of ‘fails’, instead I’ll stick with the positive experiences.

Customizing the iPhone’s recording settings is important for a successful Time Lapse event. Collecting a day’s worth of clouds has different needs from an hour at the mall or 10 minutes of a person doing a process.

Jump into the Settings area of TimeLapse to set up the recording to match your subject/action. There is a lot of fine tuning that can be done to get exactly what you need. To start, the top Use —- Camera cycles between the two iPhone cameras.

The action of the TimeLapse ‘Start’ button is adjustable between a time delay from when the button is pushed or an actual time/date. The slight time delay is handy to give you time to get into the recording. And the time/date is nice to have the iPhone in a tripod wake up at sunrise and start recording even if you oversleep.

Stoping of the recording can be keyed off of three different keys. The top TimeLapse option, ‘After 30 Photos’ shown has an adjustable number through the dials at the bottom of the settings box. The three options are quantity of photos taken, after a particular time of the same day and a date/time in the future.

Photos can be stored to the iPhone’s Photo Library. Checking the top Store Photos option in TimeLapse will allow the lower items to be turned on/off as needed (photo size and GPS tagging).

Adding a audio track and adjusting the size of the actual output video can be preset. The frames per second is important so that the right messages is collected related to the action to be recorded. TimeLapse works equally well for fast moving short videos and the longer slow moving weather and building type of videos.

A few of the settings are available through the recording screen. Handy is the alignment grid and the ‘Start’ button to get the TimeLapse app started recording based on the above settings.