i365 – iPhone Photo A Day

In 100 years, this will be considered akin to steampunk: technology quaintly beyond its useful life, only extant to provide aesthetic interest to the urban landscape. 100 years? Heck, 50…25…5?

Now that “everyone” has a cell phone these days, how poor do you have to be to not be able to afford one–a question I ask sincerely. You can even get prepaid phones at Wal-mart and Rite-Aid. I’m sure there are lots of people out there who can’t afford even these; it seems a shame that the pay phone, with its democratic promise of any local call for a quarter (or 35 cents, or 45 cents, or…how much do they cost now? Who knows?), available to rich and poor alike, are on their sure downward spiral to death. It won’t be long before those who opt out of the cellular world–or who don’t have the resources for it–are out of luck if they need to make a phone call out on the street. Would you lend your cell phone–or iPhone, given this blog–to a stranger to make a phone call? Right.

I used a combo of apps for this image. Yes, that’s a yellow phone in a black and white image. That means that I’ve finally made ColorSplash a happy member of my iPhone photo app family.

ColorSplash is an excellent, professional little app that allows you to “paint” selective areas of a color photo into black and white simply by drawing on the screen with your finger. iPhoneography has an excellent review of ColorSplash here, so I won’t repeat it. (I just discovered iPhoneography, and I recommend it to anyone who wants detailed, technical explanations of all the iPhone photography apps out there. I’ve done a couple here, but I am much more interested in using the iPhone’s photo apps to enhance photos for artistic effect, and teaching those effects to my readers to help boost your creativity, rather than giving you a laundry list of technical features. But if you want some good technical info, or compare-and-contrasting, go to iPhoneography.) ColorSplash is easy to use, after you get used to the icons and how to zoom in and out to best applying your masking. Ease of use sort of depends on how complicated your image is; the first image I tried to mask was a wooden sign in the shape of a flame–lots of fiddly details that took a long time to brush. This time, I picked an image with a simple shape, and the whole operation took about five minutes.

On a side note, I downloaded an update to ColorSplash the other day and got a bonus tutorial. When you launch ColorSplash after updating, a link pops up to a video of Hendrik Kueck, developer of ColorSplash, explaining his recent updates to the app and demonstrating how best to use the app’s functions. I think this is pretty amazing. I love how iPhone developers can reach their audience–and respond to them–in such an immediate way. I don’t think I’ve ever given a thought to who codes any of my computer programs, Windows in the past or current Mac ones; but since getting an iPhone and dipping my toe into the iPhone community, I’ve had the developer of ToyCamera comment on my blog, been linked to on the Tiffen filter site, and now Hendrik shares how he has responded to his user’s requests for various functions. I really appreciate that, as a user, even if my own communications have been a few gripes and wishlistings on this blog. I’m beginning to feel like I can write to any of these people personally and share my thoughts–and that they’ll listen. I can’t really say that about the Adobe team. Apps cost what, $1.99? And I have about $500 worth of Adobe software on my computer? Hmmm.

Back to my photo.

Here’s my original capture, taken in Ventura on Main Street:

I applied the Lolo filter from CameraBag to pop that yellow phone and bump the contrast in the rest of the image:

Then I went into ColorSplash and painted over the phone to keep it saturated while the rest of the image became desaturated. ColorSplash allows you to see your “mask” with a transparent red layer, much like you get in Photoshop when creating a mask. You can switch between teh Color and Gray buttons on the bottom to choose whether you are “applying” the color or “masking” it. That red blob indicates that I am keeping the yellow of the phone while the rest of the image goes to black and white.

And voila, you have my iPhone photo of the day:

Today’s post is rambly and deviates from my “just post the image and a how-to” recipe a bit and I hope it’s not off-putting. When I started this blog I wasn’t really sure what direction I wanted it to take: eventually I settled on just photoblogging with occasional thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts get very long and off-topic and I hope you’re staying with me. I’d love to see your experiments with ColorSplash too! Feel free to include photos in your comments, or links to an image in a Flickr or other online account. Get creative! Show me what you’ve got!