Photography

P365, a photo by PattiP88 on Flickr.

The last few days have been full of photography fun.

First of all, I'm trying to get done with all of my assignments for iShotThat at reneepearson.com before I leave on my trip.This shot is for an assignment to photograph everything I eat for an entire day! This is my first photo for today, which I'm also counting as my P365 photo. All taken on my iPhone.

I have to say it's so nice to have the iPhone 4S with it's 8 megapixel camera. I'm enjoying the better picture quality combined with the ease of use of the phone camera.

On Monday, Trish and I were inspired by a digital scrap booking assignment we were working on to go on a walk and photograph textures.

We had such a great time, and found fabulous textures, all within a block of my house. I'm sure the neighbors wondered as they drove by why on earth we were photographing the dirt! Tree bark, rust, scarred concrete, you name it. I can't wait to have time to play with these!

Today's photo

This sweet honeysuckle is growing on our fence. Photo was short in HDR Foto, edited in Camera+. It's my photo of the day.

You can tell I don't get out much - almost everything I shoot is in my yard. It's a good thing I'm in Hawaii - I have some kind of bloom all year round.

I have to get out on the street this weekend though, for a street photography assignment in iShotThat at ReneePearson.com.  I do take photos of my family, but you won't see much of that online.

Did I mention I bought an iPhone 4S last weekend? It was my birthday present (paid for mostly by me! with help from dear Kristel & Dirk). My old phone was cracking after having been dropped on concrete, and I was planning on upgrading as soon as the new phones came out. It's rather a bad time, with two trips coming up over the next 3 months that I also have to pay for, but the 8megapixel camera and Siri swayed me. Not that Siri is necessary, but I sure do like it. I just have to get used to using it more.

 And I love getting larger images out of the camera. My old point and shoot is slowly falling apart, and is only a few megapixels more. Of course it has a small zoom, but most of my shots are up close and personal anyway, so I'm not missing that tons.

Another reason for my purchase was that I use my phone a lot for videotaping students, and having the better video capacity will be a plus.

iOS5 I love. Oh, and I upgraded to OSX Lion, too last week. It went without a hitch. It just took me all of one morning to get it done.

Bellows

Beach 1, a photo by PattiP88 on Flickr.

I snapped this picture with my iPhone 3GS out at Bellows this weekend. It was edited on the iPhone with PhotoFX, Camera+ and Pixlr-o-matic apps.

Have I mentioned I'm having fun in this class? It's great to now about all these iPhone apps, most of which are free.

The only downside, now that I have my iPhone 4S with the bigger megapixel camera, is that the 3rd party apps haven't caught up yet & still save in the smaller format. This photo is roughly 3x5 at 300 dpi, as it is cropped. New photos taken with the iPhone 4S are roughly 8x10 at 300 dpi.

More iShotThat! fun

Dear reader:

I'm having great fun in the iShotThat class at ReneePearson.com for iPhone photography.

Today's assignment (well, the one I did today anyway!) is using a sweet little program called HDR Foto, which you can download for free from iTunes. With this program, you tell the camera to get the light reading from two different spots and it takes two photos based on those readings and combines them. This works great when you have an area that is blown out and a dark area and you want details in both places to show up.

In this shot, the light was bright on the orchid on the right and the bloom on the left was pretty shadowed. So I told the app to sample from the blown out area and the shadowed bloom. The camera took both shots & combined them. Then I played a little with a few settings (Polarize effect mostly) framed it, and voila!

If you have or get an iPhone and want to learn how to have fun with the camera, take this class next time it's offered.

Note: this is taken on an iPhone 3GS - I'm hoping that there will still be 4GS's in the store tomorrow morning. I can't wait to play with the 8MG camera! It's my birthday present from my adult children and myself. Sweet! Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on one before the end of the month at least because I have a trip & I need to take great photos of my gorgeous little granddaughter.

Patti

Grace, not Perfection

Here's a blog post with a lovely freebie that is perfect for my One Little Word:

Grace Not Perfection

Here's to the Crazy Ones

This is a link I want to be able to find again and again.

Here's to the Crazy Ones


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Connectivity and Creativity

Here's an interesting video from Steven Johnson on creativity:

Where Good Ideas Come From

I Shot That!

iST, a photo by PattiP88 on Flickr.

I'm currently taking a class at Reneepearson.com titled I Shot That! It's for learning how to do more with your iPhone camera. Good fun.

This shot was taken with my iPhone using Camera+, with a grunge effect and frame added.

What if?

What if the guy who sold everything he had to buy the incomparable pearl, was God and you were the incomparable pearl?

- copied from Lifestream.org


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Passing of a genius

Many words are being written about the death of Steve Jobs. The reason lies in how he lived.

To quote Scott Bourne:

So what are we doing today that matters? Mr. Jobs spent every day trying to change the world through amazing design. That was his “why” and how he mattered. People don’t care what you do - they care why you do it. And in his case, Steve Jobs “why” was - he thought the world would be better if it was better designed. He delivered that design via technology.



“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” (Steve Jobs - June 2005)

Live your life like it matters.

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Software anticipation

I'm waiting in great anticipation of this software release. I've been saying for awhile now that I wish someone would release software designed specifically for scrap bookers with layers and and editing capability and ease of access to both your photo library and digital supplies. Check out the video:

Scraproom Software

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