Technology

Lincoln City Centre Photographs

/ Lincolnshire, Photography, Technology, Travel / , , , , , ,

On Friday evening, I went into Lincoln city centre, with a couple of friends to shoot some photos of the Christmas lights and anything else of interest we came across. Between them they had a Sony SLR, and two Nikons – I took my iPhone.

One of the apps I wanted to try out was 6×6, a camera app that takes square images. I know you can crop any photo you take with an iPhone to a square but this app forces you to create your image inside a square, something that photographers used to do when using medium format cameras with 6cm by 6cm film frames. 6×6 also has a setting to take only mono photos (no second colour image saved) – it gives a similar experience to when I used to shoot black and white film.

Lincoln Minster

A number of the following shots were taken on Steep Hill – the best street in the UK.

Steep Hill Lincoln

Brown's Pie Shop

The Pie Shop used by Lawrence of Arabia.

Kind

And the rectangle shot for comparison.

Kind

Another camera app I used was Pro HDR, when the app takes two images to make the final shot, it takes some interesting ghost images.

The Magna Carta

Steep Hill Lincoln

Stonebow Lincoln

And in colour…

Stonebow Lincoln

High Street Lincoln

Shadows

Richard

By the Witham

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Photogene2

/ Lincolnshire, Photography, Technology, Travel, Walking / , , ,

I used to take a lot of black and white photos, on film, using a manual camera (a Nikon FM2) which I then processed and printed myself. It was great fun and I could produce some interesting and satisfying results. I thought it might be interesting to produce some mono images on my iPhone. I have tried the B&W effects available in the Camera+ app but thought it could be better and then I came across Photogene² as a featured app on the iTunes store and decided to try it out.

Photogene² is primarily an image processing app for the iPhone with many options including a fully featured black and white section. The interface is exceptionally good with controls that expand, become semi-transparent or disappear as you edit your image making it very easy to manipulate the effect you want. I particularly liked the contrast and exposure effect on the mono image to make the photo look like it had been printed on hard, high contrast, grade 5 paper – a result I was keen to produce.

Below is the first image I have made using the app (if I forget about the others I just experimented with).

Woodland

The original image was made using Pro HDR – below is the starting image, with the colour saturation tweaked up a bit in the app, before saving.

Another feature of Photogene² is that it has a Black and White camera function, which displays in black and white as you frame the shot, to which you can add filters in real-time – I am looking forward to trying that out on some landscapes next time I go walking.

It looks like this is a good addition to my growing collections of camera and imaging apps on my iPhone digital camera.

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MegaReader

/ Technology / , ,

I sent some ideas across to Patrick Thompson, the developer of MegaReader and he sent me this back:

Hi Clive,

Thanks for the write-up on your blog!

I’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from former Stanza users and I’m starting to make some headway. I just released my first post-Stanza update with the brightness swipe feature and configurable tap-zones; both of which were super popular requests. I continue to gather feedback at megareader.uservoice.com, where you can vote for you favorite enhancement requests and add new ones. This will help me to prioritize the work.

All the best,

Patrick

So I got the update and the backlight is now controlled by dragging your finger on the screen and the configurable tap-zones means I have MegaReader fully customised for comfortable reading in bed!

It looks like MegaReader is a good app to invest in if you want to read epub books on your iPhone.

MegaReader

Now if Patrick can just sort the app to list the books under an Author Heading first, from which we can then drill down to see a list of their books, that would be great as it will shorten my list of installed ebooks.

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