Using the iPhone 5 Camera

his weekend we took our annual Fall apple picking trip to a local farm. I took a handful of pictures with my brand new iPhone 5.

he first thing I noticed is how much faster the camera loads during those impromptu moments  when my son is climbing on something. Apple says it opens 40% faster. I didn't have my abacus with me for calculations but I can say there's almost no lag in launching the app.

The second thing I noticed was color vibrance. This camera definitely has a richer color cast and everything looked more vibrant without looking overly saturated.

Here's an unprocessed gallery.

Using Camera+ as my favorite iPhone camera app

While I shot over 700 photos with my Sony NEX-7 in Germany this week I also shot nearly 70 photos with my iPhone 4S. And I was stunned at the results thanks to the app Camera+.

Don't get me wrong I always take photos with my iPhone but this was different. Here I am in a foreign country with beautiful scenery and I wanted to take advantage of every moment.  I thought the best photos would come from my NEX-7. To my astonishment I had some equally compelling photos from my mobile device.

ut I owe it mostly to using the app Camera+. I've owned it for a few years now and have used it off and on but now it's moved to a primary position on my home screen. Here are just a few of my favorite features:

• Continuous flash
• Touch exposur
• Excellent editing fixes like Clarit
• Burst mode that lets you grab great pictures of fast moving kid
• Editing in Lightbox so you don't fill up your camera rol

ere's a photo I took in a church in Ulm, Germany using Camera+. I used the clarity filter and added some vibrance. That's it. Tell me what you think.

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Just returned from Germany

Just got back from Germany. Wow am I jet lagged. I took 700 photos while I was there and I can't wait to start looking through them and posting a few. I felt like I became a better photographer by just holding and using the camera all week long. I think I had the camera permanently attached to my chest.

I'd like to post some journal entries about what I learned, gear I used, mistakes I made, etc. If you are interested in anything at all please let me know and I'll include it.

Fixing a Photo Session

Last week I posted of the NYC skyline and I asked you to help me fix it further. I mean I already ran it through Lightroom but I knew it needed more help. You gave me some great suggestions. Here are just a few from both this blog and Google+:

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These are great suggestions. I tried to put them to the test in this screen cast.​

This week we spent our photography begins photo fix session working on a sunrise photo of the New York City building scene. We did both a black-and-white version and a beautiful color version. Thanks for all of your great tips.

And finally here are the two final photos. What do you think?​

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Overcast skies afford better photos

The sky looked great today on my way to the train station. Typically I'd be dealing with Summer blue skies which make photos fairly boring, but today the sky looked ominous. I stopped off at Bryant Park and snapped a few photos using just my iPhone 4S.

I shot them using Camera Plus and simply used the clarity filter. Does anyone know of an app that would fix the horizon line? It's especially noticeable in the second photo.

How would you fix this photo?

Last week I spent some time shooting some photos in New York City as the sun was coming up. The sky was too blue to shoot a lot more photos. As Trey Ratcliff pointed out during my interview with him, blue skies are not good for shooting. At least in Manhattan you can use blue skies to take some great black and whites of buildings. This photo did look nice when I played with it in black-and-white but I thought the blue sky was a better choice.

ow would you fix this photo? I ran it through Lightroom and enhanced some of the sky but I opted not to do vignetting. Would you put a vignetting around this phot?  

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th Avenue, NYC