Making iPhone Images

I like the spontaneity of shooting with the iPhone. It's a very mediocre camera at best. But you can make interesting images with it. Usually, you can make an interesting image without moving more than 10 or 20 feet.

I shoot images with my iPhone every day. Plenty of them are throwaway, often because of limitations of the camera, lens, and sensor (but never, EVER due to any limitations of the photographer, let's be clear about that!).

Making this a habit helps train my eye to be alert for visual interest, not just when I'm carrying my DSLR or wish I had a camera with me. (The old saying: the best camera is the one you have with you.)

Here's something cool: Chase Jarvis is a well-known photographer who's always shooting stuff with his iPhone. He upgraded to the 3GS and offered his 3G iPhone to the winning "send me your iPhone photos" contestant. Some 3500 images later, here are 100 wonderful iPhone images from the cream of the crop.

Fireworks - 2009 Rhythm and Booms, Madison

Here are a couple photographs I made of last night's Rhythm and Booms fireworks show in Madison Wisconsin, held at Warner Park. These were shot across part of Lake Mendota. It was a beautiful day, wonderful evening, and very nice fireworks show.

20 Lightroom Shortcuts

Why reach for the mouse when the keyboard is faster?

Here are the Lightroom shortcuts I use the most. Use these regularly and they become instinctual (even though the shortcut letters for some are not intuitive).

• G/E - toggle between Grid view (thumbnails) and loupE view (one image)
• spacebar - quick zoom and and out (Z does this too)
  
• spacebar-hold-drag - quick way to slide the image around even when other editing tools are selected
• 0-5 - assign rating stars 1-5 or unassign stars (0)
• P/U - toggle Pick and Unpick flags
• X - set rejected flag (for batch delete later)
  
• R - crop (toggles it on/off - a quick way to check if the image is already cropped)
• Cmd-C - open Copy dialog to select which attributes to copy to clipboard
• Cmd-V - Paste current clipboard attributes from a prior image to the current selected image
• Cmd-Shift-E - export the selected images
• Tab - toggle the side panels on/off
• N - toggle spot removal / clone tool on/off (Develop mode)
  
• K - toggle adjustment brush on/off (Develop mode)
  
• C - toggle the Compare window - I just recently discovered this - have your "best so far" of a series of shots in one window and compare a few others to help single out the best one
• Cmd-1,2,3,4,5 - quickly switch to any of the 5 Lightroom modules (library, develop, slideshow, print, web)
• F - toggle through 3 fullscreen display modes
• L - toggle through 3 lightsout display modes
• I - (when in loupe view / single image) - toggle through 2 image "info" displays and back to none (resolution, exposure info)
  
• Cmd-' - create virtual copy of selected image (I do this for multiple crops, B&W version, etc.)
  
• Cmd-E - edit image in Photoshop

Now try this... (Peeking Sun)

A post via iPhone with an image and some text.

Peeking sun.

Blog post via iPhone email

Nothing to see here. Just testing.

SMS

This is a blog post from SMS. (no way to enter a subject? just after the fact)

Goodby, Hiatus

I've blogged on several blogs over the years, including a photography blog (which I released to dormancy) on an older site of mine.

So I went on blog hiatus while I was working on my new photography website. I'm still working on my new website unfortunately; but I can't wait any longer for a photography blog.

Enter blogspot.com. Goodbye, Hiatus. Hello, it's good to be back.