Phoneography Friday 20131227

Phoneography Friday returns!

As part of my photography plan for the coming year, I’m reviving the short-lived Phoneography Friday project.

Sometimes it’ll be a single shot; other times (like today), a process. And other times, this might be a precursor for an app review. We’ll all have to wait and see.

By the way, it’s against my modus operandi these days to announce a project before it’s well underway. After all, when we announce a big project, we get a sense of satisfaction that is similar to what we get when we complete a big project (and here is some important clarification that improves on Derek Sivers original). So as far as my brain chemistry is concerned, I’ve already posted 52+ Phoneography Friday posts. In Shaa Allah, I’ll be able to keep up with it all.

This week, enjoy the process I went through to create the first Black & Wednesday post:

The steps I took:

First, the iPhone 5 camera app.

process 20131227|1|©JamesECockroft-20131225

I liked the light in the scene, and planned to convert this shot to greyscale and play from there, but I saw the filter button and realized I had never played with it.

process 20131227|2|©JamesECockroft-20131225

 

I ended up using the ‘Tonal’ preset, which I preferred over the Mono and Noir filters.

process 20131227|3|©JamesECockroft-20131225

With this in hand (or the camera roll), I took it on a trip through Filterstorm Neue to pump contrast and add a bit of grit…

process 20131227|4|©JamesECockroft-20131225

and then to the Noir photo app—all spur-of-the-moment-like—to add a bit more drama.

process 20131227|5|©JamesECockroft-20131225

And lastly, a crop to 6×7 in Filterstorm classic. (To be honest, I only used classic to crop because it’s on the home screen and Neue is buried in a folder. I also only used Filterstorm because it was handy and it’s easy to set weird aspect ratios). All in all, it was Good Times.

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Black & Wednesday 20131225

Working out what to do—photographically—in 2014… #1, get better at seeing, shooting, processing black & white. I’m not making any promises or resolutions, but I hope to post one b/w picture on Wednesdays, starting from today.

So this is the first: shot with the iPhone 5 and native camera app’s (iOS 7) ‘tonal’ preset. Contrast upped and tone mapped in Filterstorm Neue, further refined in Noir photo app, cropped to 6×7 in Filterstorm classic.

7/52-51 a Nursery and an Abandoned housing development: a photowalk

Due to spur-of-the-moment travel plans, this weeks pictures all come from one day of sporadic shooting, first at a plant nursery, and then at an abandoned housing development.

Sunday was just beautiful for walking around and admiring Allah’s creation.

LX-7, AP mode, settings in the Lightbox, with some edits in Lightroom.

Avatar, abstracted

Its about time for a new avatar, methinks. The current one on almost all social media is from 2012, and I’ve lost a bit of weight and gained a few grey hairs in the interim.

This one isn’t really in the running, as it’s just a mashup of the current one (from 2012) and a recent Hipstabstraction, combined with the Diana app (review forthcoming, perhaps, someday), then treated with the Mabel Lens and Robusta film in Oggl.

7/52-50 Phoning it in, poorly

Well, I just didn’t even try this week. Too busy with other stuff. Makes me wonder if I should give up this photography hobby altogether. I’m ashamed to even be posting these, and I have no plans to post these pictures to G+ or anywhere else. If you clicked this far, apologies, but maybe this will be an object lesson to you: avoid committing yourself to a project unless you’re willing to 1) fail occasionally and 2) actually make the time to work on the project.

Apologies, again.

iPhone 5. All shot with the built-in camera app. Most processed with Perspective Correct and/or Filterstorm Neue.

A note on Filterstorm Neue: classic Filterstorm is still the king of general photo editing apps on the iPhone, but the Neue version is slowly gaining on it, and I look forward to moving to Neue full time in the coming weeks/months/whenever the developer gets everything in there.

7/52-49 LensBaby Week!!!2!

Unlike the first LensBaby week for this 7/52, I started this one intending to use the LensBaby. And as you might notice, I got some somewhat better results (to my eye, anyway). I still wonder what I might be able to accomplish if I had the time and the leisure to really focus on photography: Allahu A’lam.

And Alhamdulillah I have much more to focus on, some incomparably better, others more or less equivalent; more or less chosen.

For those of you outside of Texas, we got about 3 inches of ice Thursday night… It took me 45 minutes to scrape the windshield. Good times. Hence the shift from houseplants to outside plants & trees. In both, I think the LensBaby held its own. Fun stuff.

For most of these, I shot without focusing, or with the old lean forward/lean back focusing method: I didn’t much bother with squeezing/twisting the lens. The minimum focus distance is roughly a foot, more or less. An aperture ring of f/4 or so might have sharpened things up a bit, but I wasn’t looking for sharp: I wanted color and light; form was secondary.

D7000. LensBaby Muse (plastic optic). ISO100, f2, AP mode. Some adjustment in Lightroom to bring out color and cheer things up a bit.