iPhones, iPods, and Filters

The release of the Flickr App, coupled with our recent acquisitions of an iPhone5 and an iPod Touch, has opened up an area of photography which I’ve otherwise managed to avoid so far.

I’ve written previously about filtering apps, touched on gimmickry, and even experimented with Instagram. But I haven’t really seriously played with mobile photography and filtering apps.

They’re tempting to hate on. At the same time, I’ve found that I really like them. I’d probably prefer a much more fully-featured set of controls but I’m finding that rather than using the filters for retro effects, I’m using them to emphasize or hide elements in the photos which I want to emphasize or hide.

Heavy vignettes or crushed shadows help compensate for the way the iPhone flash works. Low contrast or non-white whitepoints can recover highlight detail. Many of the filters seem especially tuned to the way the iPhone camera renders things and I’m starting to get a sense of what filters I like,* why, and when/how they’ll be useful.

*Mammoth in particular.

The sheer number of black and white filters is very nice. As is the ability to desaturate the image before filtering. Many of the color filters do very nice things to the desaturated images.

Also, a lot of the fake noise and film grain is proving to be especially useful for compensating for the iPod Touch’s somewhat lousy camera. The iPhone camera is pretty nice in its own right and the app is great at just letting me upload photos without having to plug into my computer. They’re both also extremely handy to just grab a photo.

The photos here are all either processed by the app or taken with an iPhone/iPod. Or both. It’s been fun so far—both shooting and processing. And that’s really the best praise possible.