Bend It With Camera+

Your picture can turn out like this when you hold your iPhone steady:



It turns out that, in Camera+, if you let your iPhone slide sideways and down on a styrofoam take-out box, your picture can turn out a little bendy like this:



I think I'll try playing with this a little more.

Playing With Percolator

I stumbled across the Percolator app recently, and it's a lot of fun. It hasn't proved to be the most practical camera app I've ever used, but I find some of its interpretations of photos fairly stunning, and I think it could be brilliant in combination with other apps.


taken with ShakeItPhoto and then run through Percolator using Extra Fine Grind, Circles Brew, and Soy Serve

Percolator has three groups of settings: Grind, Brew, and Serve. Grind alters the relative texture size with four settings: Extra Fine, Fine, Medium, and Coarse. Brew defines the type of texture you want: Original Image, Circles, Overprint, Rings, Ishihara, and Full of Stars. Serve lets you pick from relative colour temperature and contrast options: Black, Light & Sweet, Soy, and Stirred.

Here's another example of Percolator's work:


taken with Camera and then run through PictureShow using the Mirror filter and an increased contrast level, and then run through Percolator using Extra Fine Grind, Original Image Brew, and Black Serve

I wouldn't use it for the average family vacation photo, but it's fun to create arty pieces, and who knows? Some of mine just might make it onto postcards or into some of my graphic design. I am looking forward to playing around with it in combination with other apps, because some of the work I'm seeing out there is fantastic.

If you want to check out what other people are doing with Percolator, they have a Flickr group you can join. There is some cool stuff going on over there that just goes to prove that an app in the right hands can be outstanding.

In Defense of Instagram: A Study Of Contrast

With 14 different filters to choose from to art up your images, Instagram has quickly become the go to app for people who like to share their cellphone photos on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Posterous, Tumblr, and Foursquare.

A regular complaint about the Instagram app by the unconverted, though, is that the filters obscure too many of the details in the photos. What the detractors don't understand is that Instagram is perfectly capable of taking decent photos; it's just that photographers in question are pairing their photos with the wrong filters.

Some photos are much better suited to some filters than others depending on the relative contrast, colour saturation, and lighting of the original image. I was curious to take a look at how Instagram's filters dealt with contrast in particular, and so I decided to test them with a black and white photo. I took the photo at left of my friend Shanan using the Hipstamatic app with the Lucifer VI lens and the Claunch 72 Monochrome film, and then I reframed it in Instagram using no filter to get it ready for the study.

I chose to use this black and white photo specifically, because its higher and lower contrast areas will be able to show off the limitations and advantages of each of the 14 Instagram filters better than an image with fewer extremes.

X-Pro II Lomo-fi

Earlybird Sutro

Toaster Inkwell

Walden Hefe

Apollo Poprocket

Nashville Gotham

1977 Lord Kelvin

I think it's an obvious choice to choose a higher contrast filter like X-Pro II or Hefe than a lower contrast one like 1977 or Lord Kelvin for this particular image to avoid losing some of the detail in the lower contrast areas. There is no accounting for taste, though, which is why Instagram sometimes gets a bad rap.

The moral of the story?
Don't blame the Instagram app when there's a handy photographer behind the app to take the blame, because when it comes to Instagram, it's more a problem of individual taste and amateurishness than that the app as a whole is at fault for each and every cloudy picture that comes down through the tubes.