So what did I do? I went ahead and printed this photo at 12×18 at 240dpi!
(The MAXIMUM size you can print at Costco, and it only cost me $2.50.)

The final result?

In one word: Stunning.

12×18 Noritsu Print from Costco.

…and I used to work as a printer at a professional camera lab!

Of course if you view the image closer than 2-3 ft you can see the grain in the image. However, most photos of this size are usually viewed at a distance of at least 4-6ft away. In this case, the photo looks amazing. The grain in an iPhone photo is irregular. iPhone photos have much smoother grain than many digital point and shoot cameras, which is a great thing: iPhone photo grain mimics analog film grain.

Detail of print showing grain.

So there you go.

Go and make gallery-ish sized prints with your iPhone without fear of humiliation from your art friends.

If they are so close that they are peeping the grain of the photo and complaining about that then I would say they missed the whole point of how cool this is and what possibilities this creates for lo-fi photography.

Have fun!

-Kirk

Step by step instructions:

1. Take a good iPhone photo (enough light, not blurry)
2. Apply a CameraBag filter, save photo at highest quality (look inside CameraBag settings)
3. Download photo to computer.
4. Email photo to Costco’s photo lab, or bring file in on CD.
5. Print photo at whatever size you want. A 12×18 print is $2.50. How can you beat that?
6. Enjoy! Impress your friends! Have an Art show!
7. Blog about this article or better yet, Tweet about it on Twitter

On the other hand I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t share two iPhone camera apps that dramatically improve your iPhone photo quality, (especially when you want to upload photos directly to a blog or Flickr account.)

Both of these apps would have been useful in India, where my girlfriend brought her iPhone while I brought my big ole’ Canon 5D.

CameraBag

CameraBag is a fairly inexpensive iPhone app that allows you to apply custom filters over your iPhone photos. You can either do this at the time of capture, or afterward by picking photos from your photo roll.

There are a limited number of filters available, each of which mimic a unique film style. The only filter that really sucks is the Infrared filter which is completely useless. That being said, the other filters, most notably the Helga filter (which supposedly mimics a Holga) is really nice.

Kirk + Robin. Seattle, WA. 2008.

You can save and reopen photos, adding additional filters each time to tweak your photo even more. All in all an idiot-proof way to tone photos without a computer.

’1962′ Black and White Filter.

’1974′ Vintage Film Filter.

Normally I would NEVER tone a photo in my iPhone, preferring the robust options available in Lightroom or Photoshop.

CameraBag is the first iPhone app to make me reconsider this rule.

Pano

Pano is an iPhone app that allows you to create very wide and very detailed panoramic photos with your iPhone.

Pano is easy to use and works very very well.

Just take a photo, and Pano will provide a semi-transparent guide from that photo that you align with the next photo and so on. Once you have shot up to six photos, Pano will adjust exposure for each photo and stitch the multiple images into one giant panoramic photo.

It is really incredible how well Pano does this considering the relatively small amount of processing power and RAM available on the iPhone.

Pano works much better than some of my manual attempts at stitching photos together on a much more powerful MacPro Tower using Photoshop.

If you shoot each photo using horizontal shots, you get an insanely wide final panoramic like this:

If you shoot each photo using vertical shots, you get a much higher resolution panoramic like this:

I’m hoping that savvy app developers will continue to expand the creative possibilities of the iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera.

(Tomorrow I am going to print an 11x14in from the above photo. I will report back on how that looks, but I will assume that it will look pretty damn good considering the camera.)

-Kirk

The end of the newspaper era is the beginning of decentralized news reporting, where ‘timeliness over quality’ is the rule of the day.

I have always believed in the Media Singularity which is the ultimate outcome of increasingly cheaper technology combined with ever expanding online distribution. I just never thought it would come so soon.

Of course we have been creeping along this path for some time now with excellent examples as far back as 2005. But it hasn’t been until this year that a ‘perfect storm‘ of economic recession, advanced cell phone technology and cheap HD technology has cracked the giant fortress of traditional top-down media.

2009 will be known as the year that media shatters into millions of fragments, with millions of citizen journalists beating seasoned journalists to the punch by transmitting from the scene of the crime/crash/emergency/flood/fire/standoff, using only their cell phone.

(Shot with a Kodak Zi6, then uploaded to YouTube.)

A few of these citizen journalists will even be able to tell a complete story and articulate what is happening in an informative manner. (Unlike myself in the above video where I say ‘Fire Ambulances’ instead of ‘Fire Trucks.’)

Live.

With their cell phone.

Let me explain this transition in steps.
(This way it will be much clearer to those that have been holding out for multimedia to save the newspaper or for the amazing quality of the Canon 5D Mark II or Red Cameras that can do both still and video.)

Step 1: Flip Video Camera + YouTube + YouReport + Vimeo + etc.

This year, many of my articles have focused on small cheap 720/1080 HD camcorders such as the Flip Video Camera, Flip Mino HD, Kodak Z16 and Creative’s Vado HD.

These video cameras appeal to the amateur with their simple all-auto operation and ease of use when uploading to YouTube. A total beginner can shoot and upload decent HD quality video to the internet for millions of people to find and watch. Cheap and easy video technology poses a threat to professional journalists who are just now learning to shoot video for their paper using incredibly complicated HD work-flows that include wireless mics, DV Tapes, and expensive MacPro towers for editing in Final Cut Pro.

Many pros have great equipment and meet deadlines for producing weekly multimedia video in addition to still photos…but it will be all for naught because viewers don’t care about quality, they care about immediacy (Just look at the hit-counts for many amazing multimedia stories produced in-house at newspapers.)

To the photojournalists/TV people out there:

Get used to it. It’s only going to get worse.

On your current path to making beautiful, technically perfect multimedia stories, you will be absolutely crushed by the amateur who is there at the news event BEFORE YOU, sending text messages, Tweets, and gathering stills/video with some sort of video camera, cell phone or point and shoot camera with video…essentially gathering your news and eating your lunch.

And they will do it gladly, with gusto and for free. And there will most likely be multiple points of view and levels of quality for any event due to the number of people at the scene recording something.

Step 2: Enter the iPhone 3G

With the launch of the iPhone, cheap still photography meets cheap distribution, on a device that allows the user to take a photo, edit it on their phone, and upload it to Flickr or share it with friends via Twitterific instantly. The iPhone has brought together what I consider to be the two ultimate tools that a photojournalist truly needs in an immediacy driven world: a camera and an instant distribution network.

Is a two megapixel iPhone photo good enough for national news? YES.

If I still worked at a newspaper I would definitely consider shooting an iPhone photo immediately and getting that to my editor before shooting with my DSLR.

Step 3: Cycorder + Qik + Flixwagon: The Last Nail in the Coffin

This last week I jailbroke my iPhone using QuickPwn. It was super easy compared to the relative complexity of previous jailbreaking attempts using the previous PwnageTool.

This allowed me to install Cycorder which is a free app that makes your iPhone into a Flip Video Camera (essentially.) With Cycorder you get 15fps recording with sound at 384×288 in an elegantly compressed video format. The file size, video size and frame rate make it ideal for web viewing without any modification. Just upload it to YouTube once you get home…

(Shot with my Iphone + Cycorder.)

or better yet,

…broadcast LIVE using Qik or Flixwagon!!

(Shot with iPhone + Qik.) (ed: I realize I cut off my chin in this vid. Didn’t quite point my phone correctly…)

These two programs allow you to share what you are experiencing live with anyone who is on your Qik or Flixwagon channel. Some people have already used this to great success.

To me this is live news reporting at its best and on par with the video phone reporting that I have seen more and more of on TV when they are unable to send a full camera crew and truck to a live news event.

Many will say that the quality isn’t there or that people won’t figure out how to do this, but just consider what is possible now with available technology. Everything is in place, it is only a matter of a few years before the citizen journalist overwhelms the pro.

Even if 5% of citizen journalists are good at what they do it will still outnumber traditional reporters significantly.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

With millions of iPhone owners out there who will all eventually know how to send live video, take great pictures and distribute instantly through the Internet with their cell phone, how many years will it be before the news is 90% crowd-sourced?

-Kirk

Your humble author. Shot with an iPhone by Robin.

Well, I did it.

I graduated with a Masters Degree in Digital Media from UW, with perfect grades.

Rubble, 9th Ward. New Orleans, LA. 2008.

This is a photo from my two week trip to New Orleans this year as Director of Photography for the film Independent America: Rising from Ruin.
Canon 5D + 50mm.

Hair. Coeur D’Alene, ID. 2008.

Taken during the annual Car D’Alene Parade in Coeur D’Alene ID. Canon 5D + 50mm.

Slain Coyote. Priest River, ID. 2008

While hunting moose in Priest River ID with my dad as part of his 65th birthday, a hunter in a white truck pulled up to show us a coyote he had shot as part of a bet with his buddy (who apparently said that there aren’t any coyote in the Priest River area.)

While talking I shot a quick picture with my iPhone. Yes it is weird to pull out an iPhone when around hunters. It’s like an alien technology…

So the big announcement is……drum-roll please…..

My website has been updated! YES truly!! And this time it will incorporate my film portfolio as well.

So head on over to www.kirkmastin.com, check it out and let me know what you think!

-Kirk

In layman’s terms it means that the CCD in the iPhone scans what it is seeing one line at a time from top to bottom. If you are holding the camera still you will never notice the rolling shutter.

On the other hand if you are taking a photo out of a moving car pointing the camera directly at the guardrail, you will see that the image looks slanted.

The live view will look like Jello.

When you take a picture while the object is moving quickly in relation to the iPhone, you will get slanted distortion. In low light this skew is coupled with a slow shutter speed (the time it takes for the camera sensor to scan the entire scene) resulting in some part of the frame turning out blurry while the rest is sharp.

This is what happened with the above picture. You see the blurriness to the left of the frame as I swung right and stopped. Part of the photo was scanned while moving, the last part scanned while stopped. If used on purpose you can get something rather unusual.

The photo to the left shows extreme Rolling Shutter effects. This was taken while disembarking from a plane at SeaTac Airport.

For most people rolling shutter sucks big time.

In fact it is one of the main complaints of the new Nikon D90 that incorporates Hi-Def video using a bastardized version of the Nikon Live View function.

For us lo-fi individuals, rolling shutter provides a creative restraint.

Creative constraints are good. The make you solve problems and in the process become more creative. Just ask Lars von Trier.

-Kirk

Hypochondriac. SeaTac Airport. Seattle WA, 2008.

One. SeaTac Airport. Seattle WA, 2008.

Skyscraper/Escalator. SeaTac Airport. Seattle WA, 2008.

Triple Anxiety. SeaTac Airport. Seattle WA, 2008.

The Portal. SeaTac Airport. Seattle WA, 2008.

iPhone Progress

I’m getting close to my secret ambitions with the iPhone. I have written the actions, made a plan, and think…..think….that I can make gallery sized prints from the lowly iPhone camera.

Why am I fixated on this you ask?

The iPhone represents a fundamental shift in cell phone technology and direction. The iPhone’s large screen and easy to use camera, coupled with increasingly sophisticated camera/photo Apps makes the iPhone an ever evolving photo taking/sharing/geo-tagging platform. If there were a bit more manual control and perhaps 3 mega pixels instead of 2, the iPhone would easily outperform many point and shoots in terms of overall usability.

I predict the cell phone will, in a matter of five years or so, largely replace the ubiquitous point and shoot digital camera that most people carry now.

Consider this: there are more cell phone cameras in existence than all other kinds of cameras combined. The cell phone represents the everyman’s camera. All over the world!

I’m pushing the limits of cell phone photography because I want to be a leader and teacher in this field.

I believe in the photography democracy that the cell phone camera represents.

I can’t put it more simply than that.

Lo-Fi, Hi-Style: Coming Soon

I have a secret website that is under construction at the moment. It is the reason I have slowed my posting to this blog. Soon this blog will be replaced and you will be re-directed to my new baby, Lo-Fi, Hi-Style: the blog.

This new blog will be focused on squeezing the most magic possible out of common digital tools.

I won’t be reviewing the RED camera. I won’t tell you how to use a 35mm lens adapters on your brand new Canon XH-A1 camcorder. Instead I’m going to teach you to be the storyteller you are and teach you to make something amazing with a budget of $500 or less.

Interested?

Stay tuned.

I am using all of my spare time to get my baby launched. Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later. I’ll let you know when it happens.

-Kirk

Shipyard/Cranes. Seattle WA. 2008.

Water Slide/Red Bush. Seattle WA. 2008.