More than two weeks ago I wrote about my excitement concerning the iPhone 3GS, because I figured it would be an accessible camera. By now I’ve got more than two weeks’ worth of practice behind me. So how did the iPhone work out for me as a camera? First of all, I think I need to make clear that we’re talking about a toy camera here. Although the iPhone’s camera now has autofocus, it’s 3MP, has a hideous lens, so it can in no way be compared with, say, a DSLR or – Gd forbid – my Leica M8. So just like with a toy camera, you use it to give you interesting results, you use it for a certain randomness, for the stuff you wouldn’t perhaps do with your proper, grown-up camera. And so, after checking out the basic features for a bit, I decided to go overboard entirely and buy a toy camera app, and a fake tilt/shift app and use those to process the camera’s images. But more about the apps later.

Shooting the camera is a very straightforward affair: you open the camera app, and then the camera is in viewfinder mode: you double tap the screen to focus, place one finger on the camera button just above the tactile “home” button and use another finger to split tap anywhere on the screen. This fires the shutter and the photo is stored in the photo app’s camera roll. That’s simple enough, but of course, I also wanted to process and upload, because I figured that with the iPhone’s accessibility features I would be able to control my entire workflow start to finish. Usually, I do the capturing myself, then the processing and uploading with the aid of a sighted assistant, because Lightroom, that I use for editing isn’t accessible for me. But with the iPhone that’s different. I installed Camera Bag, an app that imitates, among other settings, Holga and Lomo style processing. Apart from four unlabeled buttons, that are easy to learn, the entire application is accessible. The same goes for TiltShift, and app that does fake tilt shift processing. There’s a caveat here, because the central settings part, that let’s you drag the “sharpness” area to the spot and the size that you want, is inaccessible, and so can’t be changed if VoiceOver is running. However, I chose to use that as a shooting parameter, but then, I’m very much into selective focus, so that setting might be too much or cheesy to other users. I archive all my work online, at flickr, so the next task was to find a way of uploading. I tried a couple of dedicated flickr uploader apps, that either lacked accessibility or lacked features. Then I settled on Moby Picture, which is a media sharing environment for Twitter, but it also distributes your media (photo, sound and video) to other services, like flickr and facebook. I was pleased to discover that the application that comes with Moby is entirely accessible with exactly the features I was looking for. So that took care of uploading.

The fun is that I can process and upload the photographs I capture within a couple of minutes after pressing the shutter. Both TiltShift and CameraBag allow you to use the iPhone’s camera from within the application. That means that I use TiltShift to capture, save the file to the Cameraroll, open CameraBag to pick the photo from the Cameraroll, run it through CameraBag and save it, and then use MobyPicture to upload to flickr and twitter. I’ve found that it pays off to do this one photo at a time and use the entire workflow every time. It beats storing a couple of photos and processing them afterwards, because the processing apps leave the original photo intact and store a processed copy. If you have a lot of work to process, this may cause you to upload the originals instead of your processed work unless you keep good track of the filenumbers of your files inside the Photo application.

All in all I’ve had an enjoyable two weeks with the iPhone’s camera. To have control over the entire workflow again is a godsend and an unexpected gift. And the results, if I understand the comments on flickr correctly, are nothing to be ashamed of, even if we’re talking about a hyper expensive toy camera.

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This entry was posted on July 11, 2009 at 2:45 am and is filed under blind photography, equipment, technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.