Digital SLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies [iPhone]

August 4, 2010 By

Photography is one of the passions of my life, and a while back I bought a Digital SLR camera. I can honestly say it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made, and has allowed me to take my photography to a whole other level. If you want you can have a look at some of my images on Flickr and RedBubble.

I rely quite heavily on the camera’s automatic settings… if I’m taking pictures of motor racing, I use “sport” mode. Landscape photography? That’ll be “landscape” mode then. I know the creative modes allow more, well, creativity, but I’ve never really got to grips with them. I need some sort of simple guide to what settings are appropriate in different situations so that I can learn what they do.

Get set…

That’s where the Digital SLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies comes in. It’s an iPhone app that aims to help you take great photographs. It’s the settings finder I’m most taken with – you select what kind of subject you’re photographing (e.g. flowers/leaves/nature), what the conditions are like (overcast), and it’ll tell you the best ISO, aperture, and shutter speed to use as well as giving you a bit of advice on the best technique. I tried this with some landscape photography and found it to be pretty much spot on, although you’ll want to check the photo’s histogram afterwards just to be sure. After all, “overcast” covers a pretty wide range of light levels!

Tell me more…

As well as the settings finder, there’s some useful teaching in the DSLR Toolkit. The section on “taking great pics” splits into several topics like how to take a good portrait, getting the exposure right, and thinking about composition. There’s also a section called “Part of tens” that reads like a very in-depth blog series… Ten tips for better photos, ten benefits of using Flickr, ten great online resources, and so on. It’s almost like carrying a photographic advice magazine around in your pocket.

What have I forgotten?

So you’ve managed to convince your friend that you should be the photographer at their wedding. Have they any idea what they’ve let themselves in for? Come to think of it, have you? What kind of equipment do you need for a wedding shoot, anyway? The Digital SLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies includes a series of checklists to help you avoid forgetting that all-important item when going on a shoot. You can even check items off as you pack them. I love the checklist for going on vacation, which includes a small point-and-shoot camera that will fit in your pocket. Yeh, a Digital SLR’s great, but it’s not the most discreet of cameras for snapping family photos when you’re at a restaurant. Seriously, though, the checklists are a very handy addition and should avoid those moments when you’re out and think, “I wish I’d brought the tripod”.

And finally…

Those are some really meaty features, but add in a photoshoot diary, diagrams of different camera’s controls, a spirit level (for ensuring your tripod is level), flashlight, glossary and exposure calculator, and you’ll have noticed that this is an incredibly useful app for anyone looking to improve their Digital SLR photography.

The Digital SLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies is available from iTunes and is well worth the investment of a purchase. Please note that some features require an on-board camera, hence the reason I’ve only listed this as an iPhone app.

Filed Under: Art and Design, Tech Tagged With: , , ,

Polaroid PoGo Instant Photo Printer [Review]

April 1, 2010 By

I still remember seeing my first Polaroid photo. It was on a school trip to a place called “Happy Valley”. The teacher took a class photo and we all crowded round to see this miraculous image appear there and then. This was the time of waiting several days to get your photos back from the chemist, so seeing them in a few minutes was just revolutionary.

Polaroid eventually stopped making those particular instant photos (although The Impossible Project has succeeded in resurrecting them again) and moved on to pastures new. Now the more likely thing is to want to print digital photos, and I recently got hold of the Polaroid PoGo mobile printer. So what’s it like?

Zero Ink

The first thing to note is that the PoGo uses no ink. I have no idea how that works, but you do have to use Polaroid’s own paper. The little 2x3cm cards come in packs of various sizes, but take the pack of 30, for instance, and you’ll be paying around 17 pence per photo. That’s not silly money, but it is enough to make you think twice before printing out all your holiday photos. Add to that the fact that the photos are about the size of a business card and you’ll realise this is a somewhat specialised setup.

The photos do have a peel-off back that allows you to use them as stickers, so I can see these being good for putting on a photo board, in a scrapbook, or maybe in your wallet given their miniature size.

Direct Printing

The PoGo is meant to be portable, and it’s light, small, and battery powered. That’s no good if you have to plug it into a computer to print, though. Fortunately you can bluetooth your images from your mobile phone or, if your camera supports PictBridge you can plug that into the built-in USB port. iPhone users, we can’t bluetooth our images because the iPhone can’t do that, which is annoying, but my camera did work perfectly with the PoGo.

The procedure for printing will vary depending on your camera, but I had my first photo about a minute after hitting print. That’s great – it means I don’t have my daughter pestering me about how long it’s taking to get the photo done!

But do they look good?

The real test is whether my digital photos make the transition from camera to paper in a decent state. The printed photos have a slightly cold tone to them, and when I printed out a monochrome image the very bottom looked obviously blue. Not enough to ruin the image, but noticeable. There is also some light banding across the image that may annoy. Other than that I’m actually quite pleased with how they turned out given the price of the unit, and I’m wondering if I can compensate for the cold look by altering the white balance in the camera’s settings.

Conclusion

I’d say the PoGo will find a place in our family as a way of creating fun keepsakes, images for the children’s journals and scrapbooks, and if we’re out with friends and snap a particularly cool image they want there and then. It’s a great little piece of kit, with a few tonal aberrations in the final images but, and I want to make this clear, it’s never going to replace getting your photos professionally printed. If you’re just looking for a way to produce little mementos, the PoGo is a pretty good option.

The Polaroid PoGo is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Filed Under: Fun, Tech Tagged With: , , , ,

Flickr for iPhone

September 9, 2009 By

Flickr have released an official iPhone app, allowing you to share photos, tag uploaded photos with your current location, search your own and other’s photos and e-mail them (or, at least, a link to them).

I’ve previously been using Darkslide for interacting with my Flickr account, but I have to say the Flickr app feels, well, slickr (stick around, the puns might just get worse…) It’s pretty responsive on a 3G signal, although on GPRS or Edge it can take a little while for images to load.

One thing that I think is missing is the ability to zoom in on photos, unless I’m being completely thick. I’ve tried the standard pinching movement but that didn’t seem to work.

All in all, a nice app… and at the perfect price! Free!

Flickr is available in the app store* now.

* Technically this is an affiliate link, but because Flickr is free there’s no commission to be earned.

Do you want more on the iPhone? Find our best iPhone posts here.

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Reliving Polaroid’s heyday with Poladroid

December 15, 2008 By
Poladroid

Digital photography is an amazing thing. The ability to take hundreds of photos without the cost of getting them developed, being able to review photos in the camera, and being able to delete the duff ones makes the digital format very powerful. But think back to simpler times, when “instant photograph” was synonymous with one thing: Polaroids.

These photos were the result of a special film which, once exposed, was spat from the camera spreading developing fluid over the picture. Wait a few minutes and your picture would magically appear before your very eyes.

I know it’s just nostalgia, but I really liked Polaroid photos. There was something incredible about watching the image develop in front of you and, of course, at the time it was really the only way to get an instant photo. Well now a little of the magic is back with Poladroid, an electronic Polaroid clone. At the moment Poladroid is available for Mac OS X with an Alpha version for Windows.

The program is very simple to use: start it up and you get a Polaroid camera on your deskop. Just drag and drop any image onto the camera and you’ll see an undeveloped Polaroid. You can grab a sample from this at any point during the development process if you see an effect you like the look of, but I tended just to leave the images to develop to their fullest extent. There’s no good reason for the length of time each image takes to process except that Polaroids used to take ages too! So whilst this could be annoying if you want an image quickly, I’m willing to let it slip because it actually helps recapture some of the old magic. After a few minutes there’s a chime, and your image is ready to view. It will have been automatically saved to the location you specify in the program’s preferences.

East Wemyss

A coastal ruin in Fife, Scotland

How do the images look, though? One of the things about Polaroids was that the colours were never quite right, and the authors of Poladroid seem to have worked hard to get the same effect. You can see the Poladroid image of a ruin I passed in East Wemyss a while ago, and the original here. I’ll admit that the original was nothing special, being taken on my iPhone, but the Poladroid has a really nice ’70s look to it. Once again, the distinctive colour temperature was another part of the magic of Polaroid.

Quite apart from the nostalgia, though, Poladroid does produce good looking images. You could use it to age a photograph, create a logo or background, or just for making your snaps look a bit more interesting. If you let your kids play with it, though, don’t forget to tell them about the good old days when you were mesmerised by instant cameras :)

Poladroid can be downloaded from the Poladroid project.

Filed Under: Art and Design Tagged With: , ,
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