On iPhone Photography
Posted 27 March 2010 under iphone, photos
I finally took the plunge and picked up an iPhone last October, and although my cellphones have had built-in cameras for the last ten years, this is the first one I’ve used with any regularity. As recommended in this fantastic post by Phil Coffman, I’ve been using Mill Colour and TiltShift Generator (WARNING: wonky iTunes links) to process my photos. Here’s one I took the other day, waiting for lunch at a Korean grocery store, processed using both apps:
To upload my photos, I use the free version of Flickit, which I prefer to the official app because it lets you post to Twitter simultaneously, using the title of the photo and a flic.kr short URL.
I love my DSLR, but even when I have it with me, it’s a photo better than any I’ve ever taken that would compel me to immediately transfer it to my laptop, process it, upload it to Flickr, and then tweet about it. The iPhone streamlines this process and makes it portable, and the geotagging abilities exceed those of my current setup. Certainly, you give up a lot of quality, but what’s the use of having great equipment if you never do anything with it?
I have a restrictive filter for what I publish online; I discard at least five times as many tweets as I publish. I probably wouldn’t tweet that I was meeting a friend to watch Hot Tub Time Machine. And I certainly wouldn’t post this photo to Flickr on its own. But combining the photo and the tweet pushes both across the quality threshold, at least in my mind, and is hardly more difficult than posting either individually.