QuadCamera1: The Fremont Dome
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Today’s iPhone Photo of the Day is again from Las Vegas and again from Fremont Street–this is a time-lapse shot of the giant LED screen that provides a dazzling show every hour on the hour. You can’t tell from this tiny picture, but that “screen” up there is the width of a city street. Vegas!
How do I sum up QuadCamera? QuadCamera is a passionate yet illicit affair between still photography and stop motion…still photography and motion picture…still photography and flipbooks…QuadCamera takes a bunch of photos at once.
That’s a little roundabout, but QuadCamera is what you make of it. It works the same way Lomo cameras like the ActionSampler, the SuperSampler, and the Oktomat work: by exposing multiple images, seconds apart, on the same piece of “film.” It’s not film in the iPhone, of course, but the subsequent images are attached to each other on the same frame, creating an “interval” image where time progresses from left of frame to right of frame (or top to bottom, if you turn the camera). Think of it as an extremely short flipbook. I own a Lomo Oktomat, which produced exactly three rolls of film before breaking for good, so I’m very happy to report that QuadCamera has not broken yet.
QuadCamera gives you four compositional options: 4×1 (above), 2×2, 4×2, and 8×1 (all below). Don’t fret that these examples are small. They’re just examples (i.e., they’re not very good).
For $1.99, I would have been satisfied with 2 formats. And would have happily thrown another $1.99 for an OktoCamera. So all four formats? Awesome.
Also awesome is the fact that QuadCamera gives you color filters right in the program itself, so if you’re filter-happy like me, there’s no need to import your QuadPic into CameraBag or Tiffen PhotoFX to give it a funky twist. QuadCamera gives you the choice between No Effect, Vivid (saturation boosted), Bright (highlights boosted), Dull (saturation lowered), Hi-Con (contrast boosted, saturation left alone), and Grayscale. So, six filters, four formats, all in one app for $1.99.
AND the one feature that hands-down makes QuadCamera better than a Lomo (besides the fact that it doesn’t break under a stiff breeze)? You can set the interval timer. You can set the timer! To whatever frequency you want! Okay, from between 0.10 of a second to 3.00 seconds, but ANY frequency in that range is yours for the choosing. There’s even a slider! And time measured in hundredths of a second!
Am I sounding a little overexcited? Because I felt a little overexcited when I saw that.
There’s clearly a lot of room for creative exploration here, but for now, my iPhone Photo of the Day is a straightforward 4×1 at about .25 second intervals, shot without moving the camera. There’s just so much more to come.
I love what you do with the iPhone! Thank you for sharing this with everyone. Your photo is amazing – the colors are beautiful – very creative. I always learn something interesting from your posts.
Thank you so much! I’m going to see how much I can get out of the little guy or die trying! What’s a little worrying is that I haven’t taken nearly any pictures on my other cameras since getting the iPhone. That’s kind of a bad thing.
Wow — I am amazed that you can get those pictures with the iPhone. Fantastic!!
Clearly, my Blackberry Curve is utter crap.
(keli_h from twitter)
The iPhone camera “as is” is no better than any other cameraphone. It’s the apps that allow for post-production that are really stellar.
A fascinating, and very nicely captured, photograph.
Thank you Wabikoja!
[...] Two Strip Technicolor preceded Three Strip Technicolor (see my other Tiffen Photo Fx filtered image here) and had strong red-green tones because of the colored filters used to expose two adjacent frames [...]
[...] found it, I spent a LOT of time importing all my QuadCamera captures into it. I think this one from Fremont Street in Las Vegas is my [...]