Delicious new photography magazine… Check it out:
Monthly Archive for March, 2010
Even when I was young I wanted the ability to delve into my mind and remove painful, or embarassing, memories. I imagined a soldering iron, cauterising the offending part of the brain.
As you get older, the capacity for being embarassed diminishes, but still there’s a desire to erase the painful… like in the wonderful film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind.
Well maybe that will happen one day… on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning they were talking about using it to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, but it’s hard to imagine it not being used for other reasons, like the removal of painful love…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8586000/8586523.stm
New Doctor Who on the way and its new presiding genius - Steven Moffat - has given a nice interview to The Guardian. He’s the man behind The Empty Child and Blink, which is not the best episode of Doctor Who ever; it is the best piece of TV ever. Full stop.
Amongst gems in this interview are the line “all we writers really want to do is write a script, toss it over a wall and go out with strippers” and the revelation that in the last episode of the new series “practically everything” happens - “some of it twice”.
I can’t wait.
There are gazillions of camera and photo apps for the iPhone - here’s a review of the ones I’ve tried on an iPhone 3GS, starting with the most useful. Thanks to Dave for pointing me in the direction of many of these in the first place.
Hipstamatic - £1.59
An utterly beautiful, if slightly mad app. It’s possibly a bit too trendy for its own good, and is probably already responsible for even more wistful-arty-girlie photography on Flickr than ever… and hell, who’s to say that’s a bad thing?
It does not let you apply its filters to saved images, only photos you take while you’re using the app. This is slightly limiting, but it’s supposed to turn your iPhone into a lo-fi camera - and that’s what it does. You can load (and buy) different ‘films’ (borders), ‘flashes’ (which are like filters and add flares) and ‘lenses’ which can be warm or cool. All about making more money, but it’s all done with such panache and style I love it.
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Camerabag - £1.59
A simple set of effects that you can apply to either saved images or use it as a camera. I use this a lot, especially the ‘Helga’ and ‘Magazine’ settings. There are some Polaroid and black and white settings too.
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Flickr - free
The official Flickr app is ok. It geotags photos from where you upload them, rather than where you take them, which is a bit crap. And I still cannot work out how to rotate a photo on Flickr - not using this nor Safari.
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Crop for Free - er, free
Worth having just so you can crop a photo. That’s all it does.
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Camera - built-in, free
Yes, the iPhone’s built-in camera is very, very basic - but it seems solid and saves quickly. Worth keeping to hand.
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Gorillacam - free
Great idea: spirit level, digital zoom, time-lapse etc… but I find it buggy - I lost about a dozen photos that it just didn’t save. Still, at that price you can’t complain I guess.
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Lego Photo - free
People grumble about this, but it was a huge hit keeping 10 year-olds entertained on a school trip. Take a photo or one from your camera roll and turn it into a Lego mosaic. Westy points out that you should then be able to order a physical Lego kit - like you used to be able to on their web site. They’re missing a trick here.
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Lo-Mob - £1.59
On paper it sounds good - lots of different vintage effects and filters… but I hardly ever like the results enough to use them. Too many Polaroid-type effects and I find the results not quite to my taste. There’s also one ‘Instant Wide’ setting that always produces a blank white vignetted image.
Don’t forget to touch out.
I was frantically searching for a long-lost piece of information last night, and I stumbled upon an old notebook. More than ten years ago I wrote this about a colleague, who has now shuffled off this mortal coil of quarter inch magnetic recording tape. I don’t think it’s fair to name him, so instead I’ll pick a name at random from the Adobe Photoshop splash screen.
Chris Cox must ask himself the following questions when any object comes to his attention:
1) Can I drink it?
2) Can I ask it out for dinner?
3) Can I back it each way?
Pay close attention to the Google pages. Thanks to Ashley for this.
The shame of it… I had my brain surgically removed by a very nice man in the shop and he gave me a shiny new iPhone 3GS in exchange. In case you’ve not heard of the iPhone, it’s a bit like an iPad only it is not only conveniently pocket-sized, but all models come with 3G internet access and it includes a camera and something called a telephone. This is a point-to-point mobile voice telecommunication technology that, due to high take-up, could give Skype a run for its money.
Anyway, get an iPhone, you got to get apps. Five days in, here are my favourite free ones:
Gorillacam - camera that includes a spirit level, zoom, self-timer, time-lapse, anti-shake mode etc.
BBC iPlayer - I got confused by this as it’s not an app, it’s not in the Apple App Store - it’s a web page. But the iPlayer works on the iPhone!
Calendar - okay, this is built-in, but it syncs beautifully with iCal on my Hackintosh and my Google calendar.
iCarRadio lite - it’s an internet radio app. Not sure why you’d pay for a radio app when this seems to work just fine.
Stanza - free eBook reader. Lovely.
FileApp - allows you to get stuff on your iPhone like Word documents and browse them. Needs a computer on the same wireless LAN as the iPhone and an FTP client on the computer. It does not allow you to transfer files by USB (to be fair I think Apple do not allow this). But it’s free and it works.
TVCatchup - like the iPlayer, this is a web site not an app: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com. It allows you to watch live Freeview-type TV. Brilliant! Already used this to catch the top of Newsnight while snoozing.
I also bought my first two commercial apps this morning - the rather stupidly-named iSaidWhat?! (it’s marketed as a toy but is infact a sound recorder and editor) and The Grauniad. The Grauniad app is nice but I was listening to their tech podcast happily on my way to work, about two thirds of the way through, needed to snap a photo and then went back to The Guardian and I seemed to have to start downloading it again - so I’d have been better off downloading the podcast in iTunes and using it as an iPod…
I forgot to put my book in my bag today, and so bought a new copy of Before I Die by Jenny Downham in Waterstones on my way in to work.
Inside it there was a handmade, hand-written Valentines card - four felt red hearts and the inscription “to you, Happy Valentines Day, Don’t Forget To Be Awesome! Lots of love!”. Which was a bit odd. How did it get there? Does every copy of this book have this card in? Which teenage girl am I depriving of her card? And how much trouble could this have caused?
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