iPhone App-iness - “Everyday” Photography made better

As most of us might agree, photographing the happenings of everyday life isn’t always possible with our DSLR’s. The awkwardness of taking it out of the bag and then getting the right setting often means that we loose “The decisive moment”, the reason we wanted to take the photograph in the first place.

So how do most of us get past this dilemma, strapping the camera to our heads constantly, I think not!

Instead we opt for “not in your face” convenience and pull out our mobile phones and try to get the shot, being guilty of this myself and sporting one of the world’s “smartest” phones, I often photograph my kids with my iPhone. This is normally not because I don´t want to use my DSLR but because I just don´t have enough hands to carry all the bags around. A normal family outing consists of 1x Nappy bag, 1x Hand bag, 1x One year old and not forgeting 1x Toy Bag on a good day.

So my Hubby and I have adopted a simple motto “One bad shot is better than no shot”.
Hence these “Fashion” shots I took of my 2 year old while waiting for my Hubby to reverse the car.



However having said that I have pimped - optimized (non slang version) up my phone by downloading a few really amazing applications. These are iPhone specific but I’m sure Blackberry and Nokia have something similar and are downloadable via the APP store.

First up is the app called:

Camera Awesome By Bakari Chavanu

I stumbled upon this app while looking for an OS update, this App is rich with professional photography features, but you don’t have to be a professional photographer to use it. Some of it’s features include Lock focus, self-portrait mode, Spot metering, Digital zoom, and quick editing enhancements.
My favourite being the additional composition guides, not only does it include the well known Rule of Thirds guide, but it also has Golden, Trisec, and Square guides.

 
It also has various shooting modes including Stabilization, Slow Burst, Fast (Low Res) Burst, and two different timers.
These were taken at a Fundamentals outing in Feb with our students, using the "torch function" on the flash option, it creates a great seperation light on the butterfly and flowers.





Other App’s that I recommend for “pimping-up” of your iPhone are:

*Instagram which adds transforms boring images by adding toning effects to them as well as Borders

*  iTorch4Pro which is literally a torch on your phone and is great for lighting small areas.


*Light meter which reads the ambient light in the room.

This was taken one afternoon at the college, using the the portrait mode on the Camera Awesome app allows for touch focus and blurred back grounds.