The man, Stavros

On reaching our accommodation we were pleased to be able to stare out of our veranda onto the beautiful blue green bay. Lovely little room, small sink, hob and saucepan, just the one, or 2 if you account for the metal teapot. Metal teapot, probably perfect for boiling rice I guessed.

Starting to unpack, phone battery almost dead, best send the relevant people a message to keep them in the loop, charger found.. Just need to find the plug socket. Hmmm. Nowhere. Surely you can’t have a room somewhere as developed as this and have no plug sockets? Surely. Searching high and low, found nothing. Hmnn. Here for photography and a wedding and nowhere conveniently obvious to charge the plethora of electronics I seem to stuff my bag with. Gave up, decided I would think about it in the morning.
Ah right, ‘that’ plug socket. Literally the three random non symmetrical holes in the wall. If only i had realized. I had thought they were, well, holes. Nervously plugging in our travel adapter it was soon evident that there was infact some form of power from these magical holes. Perfect.

Time to taste the local hummus and halloumi, beer and cocktails. Wonderful.

Some iPhone images of our first day:
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iPhone images:

iPhone love: Still loving using my iPhone for sporadic and spontaneous images when I’m not behind my usual SLR, and I still enjoy taking photos on the iPhone as much as when I first got it, just over a year ago. I just love not having to think about it, with no settings to fiddle with, and no worries about exposure, sharpness, defects, fringing etc etc… just forget all that and just snap away, it’s awesome. Makes such as change from the technicalities of using the 5DMK2.

iPad love?: Still enjoying having an iPad too, to be able to have my photos displayed on the beautiful screen feels like actual prints, and being able to hand it around for people to look at in their own time is brilliant too, without the weight and impracticality of the laptop. Talking of nice bits of kit….. I hear rumours of a new and updated Apple Macbook Air today.. a slightly smaller version, with faster processor.. perhaps finally a ‘proper’ travelling machine that’s not a netbook PC.. and more power than the iPad. Don’t get me wrong, I love the old Macbook Air, but it’s just not powerful enough for basic use of Lightroom when out of the studio.. perhaps the new version will change this. Still – it’s a wait ahead, they are predicting October / November as far as I am aware, and we leave for the South Pacific (Finally!) in early October.. so we’ll see.

Anyway, a few iPhone images from the last couple of weeks..

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iPhone photograph

A few images taken with my iPhone from June and early July… images from the north Norfolk coast, Will Giles and The Exotic Garden. I’m still loving the iPhone, great for shots using the Hipstamatic photo App
Love it. Still!
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Either way, the deed is done, let’s see what happens tonight… and the next few years…

So, I would recommend…. in order in which I use them the most..

1. Cool FX – CoolFx is a great application for your iPhone that pretty much all the black and white and cross processing you need, some cool effects, which don’t overdo it in a cheesy way. I use it on pretty much every image I take. It’s made my Tiffen, which are a massive photography company – and who also make ‘real life’ filters which work very well indeed. There is something like 170 presets, from cinefilm look to colour, grain, temperature etc, all great stuff. Money not wasted at all! Also has cropping, vignetting and a few other things.

2. CameraBag – a much simpler application with much less control than Cool FX, but pretty good all the same. Only 5-10 effects, but very good ones. There is a good flickr pool here for the images here.

3. PhotoFX – This app is quite similar to Cool FX, and I suggest you get both of them as you get different effects and processes, they complement each other pretty well. Buy this one too!

4. TiltShft – This is a pretty good app when you find the time to use it, I can’t say i’ve used it much but it is pretty fun and worth the money in my opinion. As mentioned in this post (linked below)

“What is tilt-shift? As you can see from the name, it comprises two parts, the tilt and the shift. Both of these involve moving the lens in relation to the film plane. The main historical use was for architectural photography — the lens could be tilted to also tilt the focal plane, meaning that the photographer could have things both near and far in focus at the same time.” More info here

5. Pano -As you can guess, allows you take a few pictures, (I used about eight) and then it stitches them together for you and produces a panoramic photograph. It’s amazing how well it works actually, I was not actually thinking it was going to be as good as it was. Definitely worth the money also. Good flickr group here. For more information on the makers website please check here

Obviously there are hundreds of photography iPhone apps, but these are definitely the ones I would recommend to others.

If you know of any good ones I should try out please let me know!

Ok, so it’s not quite so much of a photo challenge, more of just getting more involved talking simple low res images to help aid creativity – inspired by a recent blog by Chase Jarvis,

As I mentioned in a previous post:

“Chase is a huge inspiration of mine, and someone who I have always looked up to in the photographic world – it is important for everyone to people they aspire to be like! Chase talks frequently about his iPhone, well, more about the iPhone camera to be honest. Chase has always been a huge fan of the iPhone camera – as it is the height of simplicity, you have one button, yes one button. He comments that all day long he is deep within the setup of Hassleblads and pro Nikon DSLRs, and with so much to think about day to day, finding the iPhone ‘one button’ approach is extremely welcome.”

The rules are quite simple:

1. Use your iPhone to take images

2. Only use iPhone apps to modify / post process your images

3. Post to your favourite twitter/facebook/twitpic or whatever you like

4. Enjoy not thinking about settings and get back to the roots of fun images.

I post mine to my twitter feed through Twitpic – you can find my whole feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SquidleyRidleysPhotoStream

Come find me on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/SquidleyRidley

Show me you images!

So the time has ticked by once again, and I am here apologising for a lack of posts.. again. Well I have kicked things off by rejuvenating the blog a little, ditching the black background and generally doing some housekeeping on this old girl, she has done pretty well over the years – and even with my limited blog postings I seem to have 60 or 70 hits a day within this blog, it seems that the ‘how to’ posts have been pretty helpful to people over the years, and this will inspire me to post a few more tutorial/tech posts sometime soon.

I have actually been doing a huge amount of photography so far this year, it has been quite surprising really. I recently shot a wedding in Bedfordshire which was pretty good fun – still sorting those images out and making their album, am pretty happy with it so far.

I’m back on the blog really trying to get myself back in the mood for some proper creativity – something that I have been lacking in recent months as I have been head over heels with other photographic and non photographic work, I’ve been missing personal projects!

I have recently spent a fair amount of time reading a lot of posts by Chase Jarvis, who I imagine a lot you already know, if not check here: www.chasejarvis.com. Chase is a huge inspiration of mine, and someone who I have always looked up to in the photographic world – it is important for everyone to people they aspire to be like! Chase talks frequently about his iPhone, well, more about the iPhone camera to be honest. Chase has always been a huge fan of the iPhone camera – as it is the height of simplicity, you have one button, yes one button. He comments that all day long he is deep within the setup of Hassleblads and pro Nikon DSLRs, and with so much to think about day to day, finding the iPhone ‘one button’ approach is extremely welcome.

I totally agree, obviously it’s no monster camera, with it’s one button and no settings to fiddle around with – but it makes you focus on the image you are trying to achieve, and not about the camera, it’s pure brilliance.  At 3 megapixels and no flash, no zoom, no modes etc – there is absolutely nothing to think about except the image. Refreshing!

As recently I just got my new iPhone 3Gs, literally the best piece of tech I have ever owned, I have become quite obsessed with my little grainy 3mp internal camera. It’s great. I haven’t had a small camera in years, and it brings back the memories of when I started in photography with a tiny little 2 button fuji compact.

So Chase is a total lover of the camera,  and regularly posts his daily images to his website, he claims to take between 1 and 1000 images on it all day – and limits himself to the photo manipulating apps on his iPhone. So I’ve downloaded the apps he uses, which are pretty much ‘CameraBag’ and ‘Pano’ – personally I have also included the two Tiffen programs, called Photo FX and Cool FX, which have a little more functionality that camera bag, but not much – they are almost identical.

Anyway,  you can see i’m pretty excited about taking images on my 3mp camera – it’s sort of weird. But you can see my point, stop thinking about the settings and focus on the image.

So the idea is – take images with the iPhone, and use ONLY the software native to the iPhone to produce your images and show the world. No photoshop, no lightroom, no raw conversion, nothing. Just iPhone all the way… I’ll show you what I’ve been doing so far.

Obviously these are all my personal images, it’s time to move my blog away from more commercial to more personal. I just want to try and show what i’m actually thinking, and most of the time /all the time I just can’t explain it!

Chris