For my birthday at the end of December, I got a new iPod Touch (iTouch?). I flat out love this little gadget: it has a microphone, which means I’ve been able to use it to Skype (with video); to make voice notes on Evernote; and to send myself voice memos by email. It also has a camera, and since I always have it on me, I now always have a camera on my walks.

All you long-time iPhone users can roll your eyes, but since I’m still on a dumb phone, this is as close as I’ll get to mobile (and truly portable) computing. (Without a monthly data plan.)

I find myself willing to download various apps now, too. Never much for gaming apps, I mostly ignored apps when I was still using my old (“blind”) iTouch. But that has changed now that I have a camera.

I started with Camera+ and entered a whole new world of being able to adjust light and exposure on the iTouch camera before ever pressing the shutter. After I take the picture, I can mess around with effects. So. much. fun!

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The above is a self-portrait (oh yes, these apps and gadgets encourage narcissistic self-regard!) – I’m using Camera+‘s “purple haze” effect (after having first adjusted the exposure …toward the light side). 😉

Of course landscapes aren’t immune to crazy manipulation. The following three photos (also via Camera+) are of the cell phone tower at Summit Park in Victoria: the concrete tower’s bottom section is illustrated (presumably, this deters taggers), while the top is starkly utilitarian. Here I left the colors unchanged and instead only used Camera+ to manipulate the photo “frame”: it seems to me that this really changed the feel of the scene, without changing any of the colors or effects.

Alors, regardez:

First, (1) a wider view of the tower’s base in true color, and without a fancy frame; followed by (2) a close up of the base and (3) of the tower, again in true color but with fancy frames on (2) and (3):

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Here’s the second photo, zooming in on the tower base, with a white frame resonant of the 70s:

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And finally, the top part of the tower, with a kind of ratty frame in white:

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I find myself looking at things differently now, with an eye to using the app to capture how the scene is making me feel.

But wait, there’s more…

I also downloaded SynthCam, which lets you do shallow depth of field shots and more: use the app to sharpen one small area of what’s in your viewfinder, and the rest is blurred out. This can be interesting if you’re trying to eliminate “noise” – including passing pedestrians or other moving objects from a non-moving subject you’ve focused on.

So (drumroll…), another narcissistic move – a self-portrait (and since SynthCam doesn’t allow flipping the viewfinder, this got tricky: it’s almost impossible to focus on the face, and you end up getting the hand in focus instead):

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But you get the idea, right? The hand is (more or less) in focus (ok, I was wobbling everywhere), while the other objects (in this case the rest of me) is out-of-focus.

Now check out what effect this can create in landscape/ other objects.

First, a photo taken of a small wooden toy in the same Summit Park location, shot with the Camera+ app. The colors are true (unaltered), but the photo has a “polaroid” frame for a nostalgic look:

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And next, a photo of the same object taken with SynthCam, focused on the wooden toy:

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In both instances, the apps let me explore emotional aspects in coming across this random, forgotten object (the toy) at the edge of a park.

So that’s it, my most recent fun-with-apps excursion. Together with SketchBook MobileX (which I wrote about here), the iTouch and its app-enabled affordances are tons of fun and a good excuse to use my eyes.

(n.b. the above photos are viewable in full size on my Picasa page; they’re down-scaled here)

Posted: 02|2|11 at 8:43 pm. Filed under: arts, creativity, just_so.
Tags: apps, camera, iPhone, iPod, photography
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