iPhonography and Travelfeatured
Hi friends! I’ve been back from our WONDERFUL trip to NYC and the eastern caribbean onboard my favorite ship for a few weeks now. Things are finally winding down (I came home sick, five of my friends came in to visit me for a week and I got the privilege of showing them around Chicago and then the Glee cast was in Chicago for two nights and I got to meet them twice and I’m finally getting caught up with my life) and I’m gearing up to write the yet untitled but hopefully best yet third World’s Longest Miracle Review, but I wanted to do a little post on something I discovered right before I left.
If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll know that I have a more than slight attachment to my iPhone. It’s never more than three feet away from me at any time, even when I’m sleeping (unless I’m on a cruise, and even then, it’s kind of sad how often I still have it with me). I even have this sixth sense for when my service comes back as we sail back into American waters. Stephanie calls it “cellular addiction.” I call it my best friend.
So a few weeks before I left, I was looking for new apps to put on my phone to play around with while we were driving or when I had some down time on the boat or in New York. I’ll usually download apps that stream music or games, but someone directed me to Hipstamatic, a photography app, and the world of iPhonography, and my life kind of hasn’t been the same since.
I had no idea what iPhonography was, but apparently it’s this movement where people are beginning to use their iPhone as their means of photography. It’s truly addicting. And apparently, there are dozens…hundreds…of apps from the iTunes store that have kind of revolutionized the way many people see photography and iPhonography.
The obvious bonus of iPhonography is that it’s infinitely more accessible. My iPhone weighs a fraction of my DSLR. I don’t have the control over it that I do over my Nikon, but my iPhone gives me a sense of spontaneity that’s lost with more complicated camera equipment because I have it everywhere I go. It’s quick. It’s easy. It’s fun.
So, like I said, this all started with the Hipstamatic app. Hipstamatic brings back a kind of…vintage, retro, unpredictable beauty to photography. I think the basic app is around $1.99 and that includes three lenses, two flashes and two films. They have add on packages for various different lenses, flashes and films for $0.99 each, and if you download all of the upgrades (as I did), I think it brings the total of the app up to around $6 or so. Not too bad considering MLB At Bat charges me $15 a year to check the score of the Cubs games and have the ability to hear Pat and Ron call the game when I’m out of town.
The fun in Hipstamatic comes in mixing and matching the various films, lenses and flashes and seeing the different combinations (there are infinite possibilities), but what’s even more fun is you can shake your iPhone and it’ll randomize the settings and give you something totally unpredictable. And bonus- you can upload directly from the app to your Facebook or Flickr and share the fun with your friends. And uploading directly from the app saves the data (what lens, film and flash you used) so if you really love the settings, you can replicate them easily since the program only displays your last 75 shots in-app (all of your shots are saved to your photo library).
When I was in New York, I had more fun taking pictures with this app than I did my SLR (and you all know how snap happy I am with my Nikon). With my Nikon, I get preoccupied with setting up the perfect shot. With Hipstamatic, I didn’t want the perfect shot…the spontaneous shots were so much more fun. The downside, though, is that since I had switched on the option for high-quality shots (I want to put them into a Blurb book), it takes awhile to process. That’s probably the only downside I can find with this app- from the moment you take the picture until the moment it’s saved and you can take a new picture, it’s around 30 seconds. It’s around a full minute from the time you snap a picture until it’s saved to your photos. It’s definitely not something you’ll want to use for action shots or moments when you’d want to take many pictures (there’s other apps for that).
I can tell you how much I love this app and how insanely gorgeous some of the pictures it takes is, or I can kind of give you a sneak peek of the upcoming Miracle review and show you some of the pictures I took with it and let them speak for themselves (because, hey, a picture is worth 1,000 words, right?)…
I took around 400 pictures using Hipstamatic over the course of our trip and some of them really take my breath away. I’m hoping they’ll add that something extra to the Miracle review since, well, it’s the third one (and second one of the same itinerary).
If you want to know more about Hipstamaic, you can visit the Web site at http://hipstamaticapp.com/ or if you have some time, you can visit the Flickr group and go through the pictures (which are insanely gorgeous…so much so that I get lost in that site for hours) at http://www.flickr.com/groups/hipstamatic/.
So if you have an iPhone, try it out! Let me know how you like it!
