Howtos, Rants, and Reviews : Photo

Hipstamatic – Unique iPhone Camera App

willburns1 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:56:00 GMT

Have you ever used one of those plastic toy cameras like the Holga? You know the ones that bleed light and can create some really unique pictures! Or are you a fan of analog camera’s the way you have to look through the viewfinder to see what you’re taking a picture of? Well the Hipstamatic is sure to turn you into an indie kid and your iPhone into a cool analog camera.

There are tons of photo applications on the apps store. What makes the Hipstamatic unique is when you open the app you see a view finder and what looks like the back of a camera. Just like a toy camera the viewfinder is more of a guide than what is actually going to be in the photo. You can put different lenses on the camera to get different effects, as well as different flashes.

The application comes with three different lenses that all have their unique effects and the different flashes. Hipstamatic also has in app purchases that allow you to add more lenses and flashes to your collection.

The photos taken by the app are indeed very cool looking and do look very similar to photos taken with toy and vintage camera equipment. The app is $1.99 and is sure to make it to your first app page on your iphone after you try it.

Hipstamatic iTunes Store

Showzey Review – Bring your photos together

willburns1 — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:13:00 GMT

There are many different places to store pictures online. A lot of people upload photos to Facebook and even though its great for sharing photos with friends is not a good environment for discussing photography. So you upload some photos to Flickr so you can enjoy the photography community there. You also use Picasa to upload photos online because it easy to upload and share images with friends and family. You of course have friends and family that send you photos to your email address that sometime never makes it into your photo management application or online. So you find yourself all discombobulated with your all your images spread out all over the web. How do you bring them all together in one place?

Showzey is an online website that will bring all your photos together in one place and allow you to share and move them from one service to another. There is no signups or registration just go to the website and add your different image service giving Showzey permission to find your photos. Showzey then indexes all your images from all your services so you can search and filter your photos to find the ones want. You can then add the photo to one of your other service, download it, add it to a photo set, add captions or comments that are shared with your Showzey friends.

Showzey currently works with Facebook,Myspace, Flicker, Picasa, Yahoo, Gmail, and Kodak. If you have several of these Showzey will index and bring all your photos and your friends photos right to you in one place. You can even create a RSS feed of your photos. The length of the indexing process depends on how many photos you have, since my Facebook profile and friends profiles have more than a combined 17,000 photos it took a while to index them all. Once the indexing is over Showzey will not have to index them all again only the new ones which shouldn't take that long.

If you are seeking to get all your images in one place and have the ability to copy photos from one service to another without downloading from one and then uploading to the other Showzey is for you. Give it a try it's a free service.

Showzey.com

HotPrints – Free Facebook and Bebo Photo Books

willburns1 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:49:00 GMT

Are there tons of photos on Facebook that you have been meaning to get printed. Are you just not that excited about paying for them to get printed? We live in a digital age one where people don't print photos as much anymore. They enjoy them on the computer and other devices. I hate paying to get photos printed especially ones from Facebook that might not be that great of quality. With HotPrints you can get a free 16 page photo book of photos from your Facebook profile. You can choose your own photos or photos of your friends to add to your book.

What's the catch? Okay well the catch is you have to allow them to use the information on your profile to target you with ads. The ads will be placed in the book and will be nonintrusive. When I say nonintrusive I mean they are not going to be on top of your photos or anything. They are going to be removable like the kind in magazines. This may sound scary but they give you the right not to hold your information to be used for marketing so says the privacy policy.

“Your rights
You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. We will usually inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your data. You can also exercise the right at any time by contacting us at info@hotprints.com.”

So all you have to do is check that little box wherever it may be and your good to go. You can get one free photo book a month. So happy photo booking! :)

HotPrints Website

See what Lifehacker has to say about HotPrints

Recover Deleted Photos from your Camera

willburns1 — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:17:00 GMT

Have you ever accidently deleted all your photos from your camera, only to find out that there were some that you didn’t import. I know there have been times were I left bunch of pictures on my memory card and without thinking I reformatted the card losing all the pictures. All those images are gone right. Wrong you can recover those pictures using Klix.

Klix is a memory card recovery tool that you can use with your Mac to recover any lost or deleted photos. The software is easy to use all you have to do is pop the memory card into your camera or memory reader and start up Klix. Click the start button and you’re off to the races. Klix searches the card for any pictures or video on the card and presents them in a recovery window.

Klix is able to recover just about any image format and video format from any card despite what condition it’s in. Once Klix is finshed all you have to do is drag and drop the photos onto your hard drive and your done.

Flix is $30 but I think it’s worth it if you can recover lost photos that may cause you to shoot them again.

Software Review - Apple's Aperture

willburns1 — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:15:00 GMT

So I had no idea how awesome Apple's Aperture was for photo editing. I have Aperture 2.1.1 and I love it. I am very good with Photoshop and I can do all the essential things with aperture faster and more efficiently. They have a stacking feature that allows you to group and stack your photos so that you can organize them more efficiently. There is a ranking system that allows you to rank all of your photos which can also serve as a way of finding the shots that are the best. This Program is $199 and is worth very penny. Photoshop Cost about $650 for the full version. I believe that the upgrade is about $199. Well anyway I have been really impressed with its performance and its features. Not to mention that you can download many plug-ins for it so that you can do more with filters as well as upload your photos directly to facebook and other photo sharing type websites. To see the program in action heres a link to the Apple's website.

http://www.apple.com/aperture/

-Will