Lincoln Park. West Seattle, WA. 2008.
Stump. UW Campus, WA. 2008.
Stump II. Wallingford, WA. 2008.
Beach Walk. Lincoln Park, WA. 2008.
I thought, “well after a whole year, Apple (being a company by and for visual artists) would of course bring the iPhone 3G to market with an amazing digital camera.”
I was underwhelmed.
The same 2 megapixel camera surfaced again, almost like an afterthought to the other groundbreaking technologies that apple crammed into the iPhone.
Today I went out to test the camera a bit and I have to say, shooting with daylight or evening light and a steady hand, the iPhone holds it’s own.
The above photos were shot yesterday and today with my iPhone 3G in decent light. I took the photos into Photoshop, tweaked them a bit (I’m pretty good at this part I admit, having editied around ~70,000 photos so far in my career) and I was surprised to find that with gentle care n Photoshop you could wrangle a decent image.
I’m going to keep working on improving the quality of cell phone pics and hopefully I will have a Photoshop action available soon that you can use to batch process your iPhone pics and get good results.
-Kirk
4 Comments
Nice images! Interesting compositions to start with, and the Photoshop toning adds a lot. Could you get similar results with a Lightroom develop preset or are you doing things with blurs and layers here that are PS specific?
I went through a similar experience with a Sony k790a that I bought for its 3MP camera. Compared a point-and-shoot, even one from five years ago, it’s not a very good camera — slow focus, shutter lag, noisy images in anything but daylight. But once I got familiar with its limitations, I found that having a camera in pocket ready to shoot at all times made up for a lot. Using a camera whose limitations have forced me to focus more on composition and noticing details that might look good through its lens has been a fun exercise.
Is the world ready for the still-camera equivalent of the Flip? A cheap, menu-free, fixed-focal length camera that can make a decent capture under the right conditions? Something that can be massaged in Photoshop or whose flaws are part of its charm? Or is that just describing every cameraphone?
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Good post r. brown.
I think what I’m getting at here is that our society has been so focused on technical specifications and what is new and better that it has somewhat forgotten that great stories were once written on parchment and that a long time ago people made meaning from cave paintings, wood carvings, and tattoos.
I’ve started thinking that it’s is important to detach from the device and attach to the moment.
The simpler and more ‘crippled’ a visual a device is (like the Flip Video or the iPhone camera), the more pure it seems to me.
I can focus on being there and on what I see, not on a plethora of different settings, aperatures, speeds, white balances, ISO and the whole lot.
For these images I did some adjustments in Lightroom to make the image as well exposed/color corrected as possible, then I took the image into Photoshop CS3 and applied some Gaussian blur masking to soften the artifacting a little bit. Finally, I used unsharp mask to make the image properly sharp for it’s output size.
-Kirk
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“think what I’m getting at here is that our society has been so focused on technical specifications and what is new and better that it has somewhat forgotten that great stories were once written on parchment and that a long time ago people made meaning from cave paintings, wood carvings, and tattoos.”
Right but isn’t photoshop CS3 the latest and greatest photo editing software there is?
“I can focus on being there and on what I see, not on a plethora of different settings, aperatures, speeds, white balances, ISO and the whole lot.”
Isn’t it kinda ironic that while you don’t about these really basic manual settings, you go into making a “crappy” picture decent looking? If the Iphone camera was so good, why would you have to go through so much editing just to make a picture look “ok” ?
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Good points ‘anonymous’.
I still stick by using what you have on hand and going for content over technical specs.
Before photoshop, and I’m talking film now, one still had to manipulate the final negative a bit.
Even at the most basic photo-mat (remember those?) the machine would automatically adjust color and contrast for each photo so you would get some kind of acceptable result.
A pro-lab would have an actual human being adjust each photo manually for even a better result.
So you could just shoot away like the old saying “f8 and be there” and get something really amazing.
One of my last posts was taken from a Flikr account. You should read it. The guy’s iPhone photo wasn’t manipulated/adjusted, and was one of the top photos on several online news outlets for some time. I think he had over 80,000 views!
In is case it was the content of the photo which was stunning; and to the iPhone’s credit, reproduced very well.
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