writer, photographer, web person from Washington, DC.
14th St is rapidly becoming lined with condos and apartments. Where once stood a KFC and other low-rent retail establishments, another new building rises.
Shot with an iPhone 4 and edited in the Flickr mobile app. The photo also appeared in PoP in a post on, appropriately enough, hating DC.
The more interesting the work, the less it pays – that’s the rule I uncovered in 2012. It’s the reason why technical writers are paid well (you want to write a help guide for Sharepoint?) while film reviewers are paid poorly (you get to see movies!).
However, it was a great learning experience to meet so many creative folks. Truly inspiring to meet people who had written books, made movies and created web sites.
The highlight of the year was the work I did for On Tap, the free monthly entertainment magazine in DC. There’s still a special thrill to see your name in print that no digital facsimile can replace. I wrote about Lawless, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Dark Knight Rises, V/H/S, Mansome and The Sessions. Continue reading “How to Lead a Fascinating Life but Make No Money: My Year in Writing”
I like wandering the city taking photos. I’m a chronicler, a recorder, pursuing the things I am interested in – city life, the arts, travel and strong horizontal lines.
And in 2012, I got to do so much of what I love – taking boozy Instagram shots of art gallery shows, capturing photos of bike culture and recording life in this city, from protests to performance art.
Here are my favorites from 2012.
iPhone Impressionism
It was the year of iPhone impressionism, where I used Instagram, Flickr, Slow Shutter and other apps to capture the city around me. When I take photos, I’m not looking for realism – I’m looking for symmetry and beauty in the urban environment. I’m showing an idealized Washington, a place of warm tones, strong lines and order.
Late in the year came the controversy over Instagram’s odious Terms of Service. That inspired me to check out the newly updated Flickr mobile app, which has great filters like Narwhal (seen below) and doesn’t shrink your pictures down to tiny squares.
My New Year’s Resolution is to use Flickr more and Instagram less.
Continue reading “Surrendering to Serendipity: My Year in Photography”
This is from Santarchy last weekend on the National Mall. Could it be my last Instagram picture ever? The controversy over their terms of service made me rethink my attachment to this photosharing service. I like the Instagram community but they’re owned by semi-evil Facebook. And they shrink photos down to 612×612 pixels.
Around the same time, Flickr debuted its great new mobile app. It has filters, doesn’t shrink my pics down and there’s a great Flickr community that I’ve been part of for years. 2013 will see more Flickr pics and fewer Instagram snaps for this mobile shooter.
While it looks like a scene from The Ring, it’s actually Bryana Siobhan, a senior at Corcoran College of Art + Design, performing Center of Five, a ritual and repetitive work that explores personal memory and mental barriers within a constantly changing society. I took the photo at the Hillyer, my favorite small art gallery in DC.
And it’s an iPhone shot, modified with the narwhal filter in Flickr’s great new app. It’s about time that Flickr developed a decent mobile app. What I like about the app is that it doesn’t shrink photos down like Instagram and it’s tied into Flickr, which I use every day.
Snapseed is a dream of an app on the iPad – and now it’s free!
Snapseed is like Instagram’s bigger and more powerful brother. In addition to scores of faux film filters and frames, Snapseed can perform the kind of adjustments that you’d need Adobe Lightroom for. Crop, white balance, saturation, contrast, color correction, center focus, selective adjustment – it does much of what the Adobe product does but with a radically simpler interface. And a much smaller pricetag.
I like Drama. It’s one of the unique filters in Snapseed. It creates highly stylized images by pumping up the contrast and saturation. Grunge is another one, adding a beat-up texture to your image, as if it had been stored in a drawer for decades.
Over the summer, I did a photo shoot in Georgetown, using just an iPhone to capture the images and then Snapseed to edit them. My model was Lauren, a friend of mine. We started at the graceful Q Street Bridge over Rock Creek and then explored Georgetown side streets.
After the shoot, I edited from the comfort of my couch, using Snapseed. I cropped, fiddled with levels, tried and untried autocorrect, experimented with different filters, applied selective focus and, in less than an hour, I created some photos I was really happy with.
Here are some examples of the fun you can have with Snapseed.
Check out the whole set and get Snapseed today.
Receiving an email survey from a company is not unusual in American life. Amazon, Caribou, Five Guys, Target – you’ve probably been been given the opportunity to rate the experience on a rigid five-point scale.
It’s unusual when you have the opportunity to provide feedback to an actual human, like I did with Instacanvas, the Instagram artist marketplace. Instacanvas turns your Instagram creations into beautiful canvas prints and gives you the opportunity to sell them online. It’s free to sign-up.
Instacanvas has reached out to actual users of the service and scheduled calls with them, to see what they could do better. I had the chance to talk with Todd Emaus, Co-Founder of Instacanvas. He asked about what I liked about Instacanvas, what I thought they could do better, ideas I might have for product enhancements.
In surveys from other companies, I’ve seen the question, “Do you think Company X cares about you as an individual?”, which I thought to be absurd. Starbucks does not care about me. I’m just a data point in the millions of transactions they conduct every day, to be crunched by soulless MBAs in Seattle.
But a company that assigns a person to call me personally – maybe they do care. Perhaps they do want me to be successful and design an “insanely great” product that meets my needs. It’s a thought, a tiny hopeful one in the spreadsheet world of American business.
****
Rant over. What did the Instacanvas guy say? Todd said they’re planning on rolling out more contests and greater social media integration to promote the company.
I asked – what are successful Instacanvas artists doing? They are:
1. Tagging their photos so that they could be found easily. Using tags like #bike, #scenic, #landscape, #sexy and so on.
2. Promoting the hell out of their work. They Tweet, Facebook and email continuously, with news of their online store and new photos for sale.
Check out my gallery when you have a chance. It’s filled with photos of iconic sights from Washington, DC, plus pictures of city life beyond the monuments.
The iPhone is more than a phone and much more than just a camera. It can do things that are impossible to do on a “real” camera, like effortlessly stitch together panoramas and instantly share pictures worldwide.
These creative possibilities were explored by Jack Davis in “iPhoneography: The New Frontier of Creative Photography,” a free seminar at Photoshop World in Washington, DC. Davis is an award-winning photographer and the author of the Photoshop Wow books. In an hour-long free talk, he shared the dizzying number of iPhone apps he uses. Here are his favorites:
Snapseed – Give your photos a grunge look, put them in interesting frames and make them look like old film. The iPad version of this app is gorgeous.
ProHDR – There are enough adjustment tools in this app to produce HDR that doesn’t look totally fake.
Photo fx (Tiffen) – For $2.99 you get a lot of the tools and adjustments of the desktop Tiffen program which costs hundreds of dollars.
PhotoSync – Wirelessly transfer photos between your computer, iPhone and iPad.
Photo Sender – This app allows more flexibility in sending images from your iPhone to your computer, email and social media, including the ability to send lots of images all at once.
FastCamera – Indulge your inner sports photographer and shoot hundreds of images a minute.
360 Panorama – I remember the old days (just a couple years ago) when shooting panoramas required a DSLR, a tripod and an expert knowledge of Photoshop. Instead, let this 99-cent app do it for you!
You Gotta See This! – Cheesy, but fun, this app lets you create a collage of images, as if you scattered a stack of Polaroids on a table and took a picture. Again, another complicated Photoshop task now done with a click.
King Camera – This app bills itself as a replacement for your big camera. We’ll see.
Big Lens – Another camera replacement, this app does nice depth of field shots.
SlowShutter – I love this app and have written about it before. It’s great for photos that show movement.
Instagram – You can’t talk about iPhone photo apps without mentioning this social media app.
Olloclip 3-in-1 Lens – This is actually a piece of hardware, a little lens to get fisheye, wide angle and macro shots.
This is just a sample of what Jack Davis uses. His iPhone and iPad were crowded with dozens of more apps. All these great and easy ways to create beautiful imagery demonstrate the fun of iPhoneography.
I heard about Slow Shutter from James Campbell, an iPhoneographer who I’m pretty sure has every iPhone photo app ever created. I was fascinated by the blurry, abstract long exposures that he had created with it.
I have a “real” camera, a Canon DSLR, that I could use to get long exposures. I’ve done so before, but it’s always a bit of trial and error, since I don’t create long exposures that often.
Slow Shutter has enabled me to get long exposures just with a click – the app is that easy. I downloaded it, played it with a bit (the controls are little cryptic), then went out into the street. I wanted a photo of cabs going by.
But the cabs weren’t going fast enough – they didn’t have the long lines I wanted. So, I went to another corner and waited for the stoplight to change. Taxis took off and I got my shot.
I ran the photo through Slow Shutter, adjusting the “freeze” until it was dreamy, blurry and ghostlike while still retaining enough of the scene to make it identifiable.
Then I used Instagram (best iPhone photo app ever) to crop it to a square, Polaroid format using the X-Pro II filter. The filter also vignetted the photo, something I always like.
My dreamy cab shot made the DCist Photo of the Day. It’s one of those common urban scenes but with a slightly different, mysterious perspective.
Some photographers might look at Slow Shutter and say, “That’s cheating.”
My knowledge of f-stops and exposure times is, at best, limited. Just a few years ago you’d need fancy equipment, technical knowhow and darkroom experience to get such a shot. Now it can be done with just a click.
But what can’t be duplicated by technology is a good eye. Apps like Slow Shutter just make it easier for photographers to achieve their vision.
And like a good iPhone app, it’s also a lot of fun.
I recently won first place in the Fotoweek Mobile Phone Image Contest. Here’s how I came up with the winning photo.
The theme of the competition was “Fotoweek Through the Mobile Lens”:
Mobile devices allow you to get up close to capture intimate moments, abstract macros, candid street photos, night projects, and what FotoWeek DC Festival means to you this year as you walk around DC and experience all of our events.
I went to several Fotoweek shows but was so busy seeing amazing photos that I hardly took any pictures at all. Continue reading “First Place in the Fotoweek Mobile Phone Image Contest”