Snarg.

Considering I had Monday off, this week has gone so slow.

I had a couple of photos on my camera camera but I accidentally deleted them in my half-awake state. Just a couple of macros; nothing inspired.

The 4 continues to impress me. App creators are really doing wonders with the camera, and I’ve now settled on a mix of Hipstamatic and Camera+ as a complete replacement for the native camera app. Camera+ could be a little quicker to respond, but you can’t argue with the results. Well, you could, but you’d be stupid to – they’re photos; they can’t argue back.

That Hipstamatic App. Over the past couple of months, more and more of my friends have been posting photos from this app and they’ve kinda been grating on me a bit. I don’t know why this is, it’s more of a reflex than anything. I guess, being a bit of a purist with everything I try, it makes me sad to see such a beautiful artform distilled to an iPhone app and consumed by people who don’t really appreciate it. I’ve got to stop being like this – it’s great that people take photos loads now, and the voyeur in me enjoys looking at all of them really.

So, why have I now decided to try this app-I-once-hated? I’ve been lusting after something a little more organic, photographically, for a while. I really want the purely mechanical Nikon FE and the beautiful Polaroid SX70, but it’s impossible to find 35mm film that doesn’t contain the ground bones of dead animals, and that Polaroid is such an expensive habit that I don’t think I can justify it. At least not now.

The problem with the above is that the camera porn is a pretty substantial part of the battle. I mean, look at that FE. So industrial. You could beat someone to death with it, load some film and shoot away and it wouldn’t even know the horrors of its past. Without wanting to sound like I’m 90 years old, they just don’t make ‘em like that any more. And the SX70 is a gorgeous piece of kit, lovingly restored by actual Polaroid engineers – what camera/gadget nut wouldn’t swoon over it?!

The major aspect, of course, is results. Analogue photography has a certain way about it. I see a lot of people on flickr emulating the way film looks, and they do a great job, but I don’t like to change things. If a photo comes out of a camera with perfect colour representation, I don’t like changing that. If I accidentally screw the white balance or the focus is way out, I usually quite like that. It seems organic (well, as organic as a digital photograph can be). So playing with the sliders on a digital photo to make it look more film’y just doesn’t compute (awful, awful pun). Shame. With the iPhone 4 camera being the great quality it is, I’m going to start trying some of these kooky photo apps to try and fill the void of the film cameras I lust after. It probably won’t work, but I feel like I have to try it. This is the first thing in four-ish years that I feel like I’m missing out on, being vegetarian, but I just can’t bend my own rules to justify it.

So far, I’ve bought IncrediBooth, Camera+ and Hipstamatic (the latter needing an update to really bring it in line with the 4′s capabilities). What else do I need?

Before anyone points out that jelly uses ground animal bones, these little pots don’t. The only one that isn’t veggie friendly is the red one, because of the food colouring. So there

MEGAPIXELS! At last, we’ve got some megapixels. Anyone who’s anyone knows that if your camera doesn’t have megapixels coming out the wazoo, it’s not worth your precious time. So, now that the iPhone is rockin’ 5 whole megapixels, it’s automatically good. Because, a shitty, blurred, noisy photo is automatically better when it’s bigger.

I’m super-impressed with the quality of images coming out of the new iPhone. Yeah, there are probably better cameras you can put into a phone, but there aren’t better phones so that argument becomes kinda moot from my point of view. The way I like to test a decent quality camera is to take low-light photos with it. You’ll find that you can get a decent result with basically any camera if there’s abundant light, but how often do you get perfect light? Never, that’s how often.

So, on my sobering-up, American-Dad-watching journey home from Hove last night, I thought I’d see what sort of results I could get from the updated iPhone camera. I am pleasantly surprised with the results:

The first thing I noticed to my tastes is how noise is handled. Yes, the images got quite noisy, but the deviation from the true colour is much improved with this new camera. By contrast, by iPhone 3G would always throw purples into noise, making it look quite terrible. A lot of cameras do this; I don’t know why.

The image also appears quite stable. The (not always correct/intended) focal points are in focus, even with my rubbish trembling hand, which is another marked improvement on the previous phone.

The iPhone camera is now much quicker to respond. This is a huge advantage over even quite expensive point-and-shoots that I’ve had the displeasure of using. When I hit the shutter release, that’s when I want the photo taken – not in a few seconds. Charlotte’s Canon G9 is a huge offender for this, and phones I’ve used previously have been as well. One of the main reasons for my preference of SLRs over more consumer-aimed cameras (I know, who hasn’t got an SLR) is that the shutter responds instantly. This is the first (admittedly, not of many) non-SLR that has an acceptably immediate shutter release.

Whilst I could go further into the clarity of images compared with previous iterations, you can see all that from the photos. These points are the main, non-immediately-obvious reasons that the iPhone camera has vastly improved with iPhone 4. I even went out yesterday for the first time in nearly two years without taking my main camera with me.

I should point out that these images aren’t intended to be an exercise in “look at this beautiful photo I’m proud of”, more, “look at how well this performs in these conditions”.

I have really not been interested in the old camera recently. I’m riding a video game, inflammatory writing and coding wave at the moment. My poor guitar.

Charlotte used to collect these leaves, because of the ridges.

I seem to be on a closeup kick the last couple of days. I might go walking somewhere I’ve not been before tonight – there’s got to be so much of this place I’ve never seen before.

I don’t know what that pigeon is up to, but I do know I’d be more scared of a pigeon above me than a human in front of me. Saying that, DSLRs have been mistaken for RPGs, so maybe he’s just seen that.

We all use math, every day.

There’s no-one cooler than the guys playing a SNES emulator in the pub (and publicly failing at Mario!)

Even a lovely, white R8 doesn’t proclude you from getting ticketed for parking like a twat.

Jake?

I always seem to spot something different on the way to catch a train. The light we’ve been having in the morning recently has been so bright, it’s my favourite time to go out hunting for photos.