What's in My Camera Bag
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 at 11:13AM | Editor You may recall a few months ago I began a new feature here on the iPhoneography blog called "What's in My Camera Bag". The feature started off well enough, but due to poor responses the feature slipped to the sidelines. Well I'm in the process of reviving this interesting and informative behind the lens look at what fellow iPhoneographers are using to capture and create their images.
To help this relaunch, I thought I'd share with you the apps and accessories that form part of my very own mobile, fit in my pocket camera bag. Until recently I used the iPhone's default camera app to capture all my images, as despite the brilliance of the top all-in-one camera replacement apps, Apple's offering was all that I needed. That was until 645 PRO came along. 645 PRO, as many of you will know allows me to shoot in any one of 5 different formats (ratios), from a square 6x6 to a wide 6x17, with real film looks, and if I wish, at the same time save a full frame uncompressed TIFF, or I can shoot and save clean (no film emulation) full-framed, uncompressed JPEGS direct to the camera roll (which is now my chosen method).
Above: This shot was taken with 645 PRO and my wide-angle iPro lens, then processed in Snapseed.When it comes to editing my photos, I have now pretty much standardised on just one app, and that is the very excellent Snapseed from Nik Software. With its professional grade effects and easy to grasp controls, I can quickly tweak and enhance my photos to achieve the look I want whilst on the go, and produce results that are similar to those that I can produce on my Mac using Nik's Aperture plugins, and photos taken my Fuji x10 or Canon 60D.
Above: Another shot taken with 645 PRO, my wide-angle iPro lens, and processed in Snapseed.Whilst Nik's Snapseed app is excellent for enhancing photos, creating dynamic HDR like images, or creating contrasty grainy looking black and white images (to name just a few of its abilities), there are times when I just want to quickly clean up a photo, and for that I turn to award winning Athentech's Perfectly Clear.
In addition to the three core apps above (645 PRO, Snapseed and Perfectly Clear), I also use AutoStitch for creating panoramic vistas, TouchRetouch for removing unwanted elements in a photo, ColorBlast! for creating black and white photos with a splash of colour, QuickPix for those rapid fire situations, FlickStackr for uploading my photos to Flickr, and Big Lens for when I want to give an image a point of focus/shallow depth of field.
There are times, as with everyone, when I don't know what I want to do with a photo, and it is on these occasions that I turn to one of the ever popular 1-click quick fix apps. Now I've used and tried many over the years, but my current favourite and relative new comer, is Jazz, which offers up randomly generated results, but also if the mood takes me, allows me to tweak the resulting image.
Above: Not my normal type of shot, but I captured this scene in a coffee shop in London, then used ColorBlast! to convert to B&W before adding back the splash of red. Then I added the point of focus and colour tint with Big Lens.In addition to the apps I use to capture and edit my photos, there is one app that I use for every planned photo shoot (whether it's with my iPhone or not), and that is LightTrac. LightTrac allows me to work out the position of the sun at any given time, and at the destination of my planned shoot, anywhere in the world, which is essential for my preferred subject - landscapes.
Above: My iPhone 4 mounted to the side of an Alfa Romeo with my Joby Magnetic GorillaPod, and protected by a Diff case. So, that's my arsenal of photo apps covered, but what about hardware. Well I'm still shooting with an iPhone 4 (not 4S), which is now housed in the newly released Diff Lens Mount Case, which I attach my Schneider iPro lenses to, and when I need some extra stability, I turn to my Joby Magnetic GorillaPod, which the Diff case nicely fixes to. When it comes to extra juice, I'm fortunate that my preferred subject (landscapes) allows me to charge my iPhone whilst driving from A to B, but when I'm really stuck, then I grab a set of batteries (which I usually have with me, but if not I can get a set from just about anywhere, corner shop, petrol station or any retail outlet) and my Griffin TuneJuice.
Above: A series of shots were taken with the iPhones default camera, then stitched together with AutoStitch to create this panoramic, and finally processed with Snapseed to give it a more dramatic look.Well, that's the core apps and hardware that I use to capture my mobile photos, but one of the questions I've posed to the other iPhoneographers that have taken part in this series, is, "if there was one app or accessory that you would recommend, what would it be?" Well, I have 2 recommendations, the first is grab yourself a copy of Snapseed and spend time exploring its capabilities, and the second, if you can afford it, expand your iPhones field of view with an add-on lens system (either the Schneider iPro or Olloclip).
Well, I hope you've enjoyed what's in MY camera bag, and look out for more in the series soon.
Reader Comments (25)
Cheers
Geoff
It's also a great idea for a series - where other readers can contribute their setups. Not sure how that's going to work though - do we just add comments to this post or do we submit more substantial contributions in some other manner.
Also, I salute you for your continued use of "whilst"!
These are the apps I have on my iPhone 4; I love them all, but starred apps are the ones that I particularly recommend:
*ACDSee Camera Flash - EXCELLENT app for correcting exposure, contrast and vibrancy. You don't even have to do anything; just load your photo and adjust the slider.
*TouchRetouch - EXCELLENT app for removing unwanted parts of a photo. Results vary but are very impressive the majority of the time.
*Snapseed - EXCELLENT app for just about any editing I need to do. All iPhoneographers should own this app.
Image Straightener - this useful app gives precision control when I need to straighten a photo (for example, levelling the horizon in a landscape shot). Snapseed has a straighten function but it's not as good as this app.
A+ Signature - a versatile and brilliant app for annotating photos.
Blue Tint Cleaner - a nice little app for removing that annoying blue/green tint that appears smack bang in the middle of iPhone 4 shots under certain lighting conditions (fluorescent, I think).
Simply B&W - the BEST app for creating black-and-white photos.
NightCap - brilliant app for taking photos in low-light conditions. This app works exceptionally well but you will need a tripod for truly impressive results.
PhotoSize - a great little app that tells me the resolution of photos. I use it more than I thought I would.
That's it! My absolute must-have photography apps are ACDSee Camera Flash, TouchRetouch and Snapseed.
As far as accessories are concerned, I am on a budget so with that in mind I would highly recommend the Joby Gorillapod Original. It's an incredibly versatile tripod that works as advertised; it is also small so is easy to carry around. You'll need a mount with this tripod; I have a cheap one that I got from Amazon for about £4 but I will be purchasing the awesome Woxom Slingshot when it is released next month.
Do you have test "The Photographer's Ephemeris" compared to LightTrac ? (http://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/the-photographers-ephemeris/id366195670?mt=8). TPE has an iApp and a mac app versions ;o))
Best regards from France
Here is a list of additional apps which I like:
- Hipstamatic: for me a must have for nice analog pictures, nice to play with
- Camera+: better then the standard iPhone Camera, en easily to crop photos and some nice filters!
- Pro HDR: Really a must have for everyone! Nice HDR pics, much better then the standard iPhone HDR function. You can try this one out with the free lite-version
- Filterstorm: Not so good as snapseed, but this one is more a "photoshop elements" on your iphone app for detail-editing with layers and all that. Sometimes it crashes but I heared there is a bugfix comming
- Nightcap - for shooting photo's in the dark / twilight, works very well!
- Instagram of course - no explanation needed
- A good sharing app sharing photos from your computer to your iPhone without losing resolution and Exif information. (your photo are being reduced automatically by Itunes). I use Phone Drive, works great! (tip: don't use the save to library from the photo menu, use it from the start menu (where you can add more files) to preserve Exif information)
I hope that someone else has more tips / ideas!
Helped me a lot in the ladt time with the orientation in the world
of photo-apps.
Just one question about 645 PRO:
In the german AppStore it has pretty bad recensions because of
a bad overheating of the 4s and that it sucks out the battery very fast.
Thats why I did not dare yet to try it. What can you guys tell about that?
645 Pro is a very good shooting app but it drains my 4s double as fast as ProCamera for example. Hopefully they can improve with an update. Last update was all about features.
Thanks for the info. Do you have heat problems too?
I just wrote a support mail in the hope to get a few information about planned updates about that.
Unfortunately I´m not a programmer, so I absolutely have no clue about those things and how they can be solved (or not). Maybe I will get a response.