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

I’ve really been looking forward to this trip for months now….since Summer really, when we all booked our tickets.

I used to travel a lot when I was younger.

In fact I made it to many corners of the world…in the years leading up to me becoming a photographer. I vowed never to travel abroad again until I was a photographer, a real photographer, and capture what I experienced to share with others.

Now, years later, I find that my job as a photographer has kept me in the United States. I have made a lot of progress in the last few years, but I never fulfilled my wish of using my photography skills outside the United States (except for a brief stint in Sweden and Norway a few years ago.)

I’m heading to India to relax, think about the year ahead, and come back to the United States with a refreshed sense of direction, new goals and hopefully a beautiful set of photos and/or videos.

My whole kit for three weeks. Seattle, WA. 2008.

3 Shirts, 1 pair of pants, 1 pair of shorts, hat, Ray Bans, toiletries, small Mole Skine journal, pen, plug converter, flashlight, money belt, Canon intervalometer, Sony T500 + accessories (for 720P HD video,) lens cloth, lens cleaning swabs and fluid, battery charger, Canon 5D, Canon 50mm f1.4, Canon 17-40mm f4, 24GB of CF Cards, my passport, two novels and last but not least, a small Kata backpack given to me as schwag at last year’ Aurora Photos meeting in Maine.

As you can see I am traveling super light. No more than what can fit into a small school bag. I hope to lose myself in the experience and follow where the story takes me.

More updates to follow, as internet access allows.

-Kirk

Double Rainbow. I-5. Washington, 2008.

Totem Pole. Somewhere in Oregon, 2008.

Blue House Smoke. I-5. Washington, 2008.

Christmas Trees. Beaverton, OR. 2008.

We Have Secured a Tree. Beaverton, OR. 2008.

I’ve just come back from a lovely visit to my girlfriend’s sister’s house in Beaverton, Oregon.
We managed to get a great tree for real cheap (thank you economic recession.)
As usual, most of what I shot during the weekend was with the Canon 5D and either a 50mm or 90mm lens.

All I can say is that I’m forgetting what it’s like to use anything else…and I don’t care.

Nothing looks like a 50mm lens.

It’s something about the flatness of the image, the lack of distortion.

It just feels…right.

The lens I used to hate so much is now my only lens. The 90mm came along as a food lens, for some close up pics of what we baked that weekend (cupcakes.)

As time passes I have become more firm in my belief that if a picture isn’t good it isn’t good. No matter if it’s shot with the artifice of an extremely wide or extremely telephoto lens.

If it doesn’t look good as it truly is, (and the 50mm is as close to the truth as you can get…it mimics the field of view of a human, have you heard?) then you can’t make it look good.

Not in the long run. Not with fancy filters, not with any actions, no way, no how, nada.

Most of the classic photos from the past were shot with a 50mm. The original lens. The first optical formula. The easiest, simplest formula.

I love ‘normal.’

I love the 50.

-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

After a few flights I began to pass time by shooting things with my iPhone. Unlike my bags of photo gear, my iPhone is always accessible, usually unnoticed by people (as well as security,) and it is fairly quick to use.

Here are a few photos from those many flights between Seattle and Portland:

Red lines. Seatac Airport. 2008.

White Lines. Seatac Airport. 2008.

To Terminal, Do Not Enter. Seatac Airport. 2008.

Robin. SEA-GEG. 2008.

Sun Rays, Puget Sound. 2008.

Alaska Truck. Seatac Airport. 2008.

Robin, Tarmac. Seatac Airport. 2008.

Baggage Terminal 12, Seatac Airport. 2008.