QuadCamera for iPhone
When I was in high school, I was very much into photography. I was photo club president and converted my bedroom/bathroom into a black and white darkroom. I spent many hours in my darkroom, learning the craft and even loving the smell of Dektol. When I was 16 or 17, I bought my first toy camera, a Lomo LC-A, and I learned how to have fun with photography. I entered college as photography major, but after a semester put the camera down and switched to graphic design. It’s still something I feel guilty about. Hell, I don’t even own a dSLR…
While the iPhone camera has it’s flaws, it definitely is a decent camera to have at your disposal 24/7. Once you learn how to manipulate it and exploit what it does well, you can get some really great shots.
I recently downloaded quite a few photography Apps for the iPhone. The one I’m loving most right now is QuadCamera, from Art&Mobile. It’s the fourth in a series of ToyCamera Apps by Art&Mobile, all of which add nostalgic effects to your iPhone images.
QuadCamera mimics the effect of the Lomo ActionSampler, but with lots more options. You can choose from four different layouts (2×2, 4×1, 4×2 - pictured below, and 8×1), and well as set the timer to snap every half second, all the way up to every 3 seconds. The App also gives you options when it comes to color processing. These photos were shot with the ‘vivid’ setting, but you can also choose dull, grayscale, bright, hi-con, and no effect.
When I visited Art&Mobile’s site, I found a free little gem called QuadAnimator. It allows you to upload any image processed with QuadCamera and create an animaged .GIF (as seen above). No software is necessary. You can do it all on the website via Flash, which is nice. Art&Mobile also provides a downloadable version of QuadAnimator for both Windows and Mac.
If you like to take pictures or just want to have more fun with your iPhone camera, you should check out QuadCamera (iTunes link). It’s available for $1.99 and I think it’s a steal.
The Delano and Ritz Plaza hotels on A1A, at Collins Ave.
The uncertain future of newspapers
As a young journalist who stumbled upon Clay Shirky’s latest blog post, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, I cannot ignore the truth of his statements. Shirky, who describes himself as a consultant, writer and teacher who focuses on the social and economic effects of the Internet, was unknown to me before I read this article.
Shirky states that we are in the middle of a revolution in regards to newspapers and journalism. Now is the time to be bold and try new business models.
Here are a few quotes from his blog post, which you can read in its entirety here:
There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
There is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
You can read more from Clay Shirkly at his website, www.shirky.com, and his blog, www.shirky.com/weblog.
Print vs. the Internet
One of the issues I’m struggling with presently is whether or not to stay in my chosen profession: (print) journalism*. There are many facets to this problem, but one of the larger issues for me is Print vs. the Internet. For me, and most people of my age, the Internet is the choice medium for news consumption. I get my news from RSS feeds on my iPhone and Netvibes. Twitter gets me the top headlines before they’re even posted the news sites. But, I feel like a hack not picking up and reading the product I work on 40+ hours a week. I didn’t even bother getting a subscription to the paper when I moved back to South Florida because, for the most part, I already know what’s in the paper and have read some version of it on the Internet.
‘Flip-flop disease’
On Christmas day, at my parents house, I told them about some foot pain I was experiencing. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but the pain never really went away. As a few weeks passed, I went online to Google the pain. The diagnosis? Plantar Fasciitis (Wikipedia) . Basically, years and years of wearing only flip-flops had done damage to my feet.
I’m back …
I’ve been coding up the new WordPress 2.7 for the last week (granted, not much time put into it) and making plans for how I can start blogging again. Stay tuned, because I will be posting daily - whether it’s a photo (on the right column) or an actual post. Right now? I need a nap. More in a few hours. Promise!
