iphoggy-bloggy

What are you Oggling at?

rugfoot — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:44 +0100

This week saw the launch of Hipstamatic’s long-awaited photo-sharing app. And what have they decided to call their new app, I hear you ask? Well, no doubt after great investment in some expensive Los Angeles PR consultancy, they’ve settled on the name Oggl. OK, yes, like Flickr, Tumblr, Grmblr, they’ve missed out some letters. That’s the first five minutes of the consultant’s fee. But what about the actual meaning of the word. Or the things that people think of when they hear it. Did they road-test it in the UK? Possibly not. Did they even road-test it anywhere? Possibly not. The (presumably American) Urban Dictionary gives as an example of the word’s usage: “Dude, don’t oggle my Mom’s tits”. So far, so bad. Think a bit more and “oggle” has the connotation of looking at something without one’s brain switched on. Not very good for an app for a “Community of Creative People”.

Maybe they chose it to lure the takeover interests of Google, which wouldn’t have to do much rebranding if they decided to launch Google Oggle? (Shame Google aren’t called Goggle, as Goggle Oggle would have been a cracking name). Perhaps some additional research could also have been spent on finding out whether @oggl already existed as a user name on Twitter. It does. Poor Oscar Garcia (1 follower, me) must have wondered where all his new-found popularity had come from when he picked up his phone last Saturday morning.

But perhaps the Hipstas are one step ahead of the game (they usually are)? Perhaps it is a knowing wink to a tradition of embarrasingly named killer brands. Our own mobile world continues to suffer something of an identify crisis. Last year we saw the coining of the term “motography” (nothing to do with Jeremy Clarkson) and to untrained ears the most universally accepted term in the mobile photography world, iphoneography, raises some eyebrows. And of course my own attempt to coin “iphoggy” must - I think I now have to admit - be deemed a failure. I didn’t do any research into that one either.

What are you Oggling at?

Oggl goes to Ostend

rugfoot — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:16:00 +0100

Oggl seems to be monopolising my blog lately and today’s blog is about the day I discovered it, when I was in Ostend last Saturday. You might remember a blog I did a while back when I wrote how stupidly overjoyed I was to be invited as a blogger on a trip to visit Ostend (all expenses paid!) by the lovely people at the Ostend tourist board. They had just launched a tour about the fascinating story of Marvin Gaye’s 2-year stay in Ostend.

Part of the reason for me being there was to take photos. I had done my homework and had a plan. Meet the other bloggers at 10:00 for the tour and shoot in Hipstamatic. I expected to be taking loads of photos and posting some of them up straight away. And I would be with a group of other people so I didn’t want to be sat in the corner apping away all day. I wanted a good shot, some nice filters and, bam, up on line. And since the photos from the trip would be presented as a group, I wanted a consistent style. Hipstamatic ticks all those boxes. I chose a Jane+Inas82 combo. Clean, nothing too fussy. But my plans were thrown into disarray by the news that Hipstamatic had launched Oggl. In the mercenary scramble for followers, I knew the first movers would pick up some numbers. So, change of plan. I used Oggl as well as Hipstamatic. But I soon noticed that the pics weren’t saving to my camera roll and, as I mentioned yesterday, I got the feeling the photos were looking a bit fuzzy. So I switched back.

As I made my way to the starting point for the tour, I noticed some amazing kites being flown on the beach. I was particularly drawn by a huge clown’s face kite, flying high in the sky. Then there was a huge whale. And the multi-coloured teddy bear. I was running around the beach like a little kid, enthused by these mad kites, now lit by some lovely sunshine against a blue sky. And before I knew it, I was late for the tour.

As an iPod-led walkumentary, I was able to catch up the rest of the group, so it didn’t matter too much. And a fascinating tour it was. It’s good to make plans but you have to go with the flow and go where the pictures lead you. See some of those pictures here.

The weird and disappointing thing about Oggl

rugfoot — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:18:00 +0100

As we take a closer look (quite literally) at Oggl, we discover some weird and disappointing things. In my blog yesterday I initially said that the pics seemed to be saving on my camera roll at full res. My good friend Brad Puet at Juxt questioned this and when I tried to find a picture that I’d published to Oggl and which I thought I had on my camera roll, I realised I couldn’t find it. I had dual-posted the picture to Flickr via the Oggl app, and it showed there at a very weak 640x640 pixels. And on closer inspection (quite literally) the photo displayed on the Oggl app (and on Flickr) was looking a bit fuzzy. So, when you post photos to Oggl, they don’t save on your camera roll and they publish in low-resolution versions.

But the totally weird thing (as discovered by my good friend Federico Sardi) is that you can produce a high res image via Oggl on your camera roll. Here’s how. You take a picture. You see it in your Oggl lightroom but it doesn’t save to your camera roll. However, if you change one of the filters on the picture, it saves to your camera roll in full resolution. Why? I’ve no idea and it looks like a bug.

So we have a workaround to save onto the camera roll. But we still have a photo stream of very low res images. Scrolling through the photos of other people on Oggl, I start to get an overwhelming sense of visual disappointment. All these photos are displaying at around a quarter of the size of most photos on Instagram. And it shows. They all look a bit wishy-washy. That’s a bit disappointing for an app with supposedly sound aesthetic credentials. And disappointing for someone (me) who is a massive fan of Hipstamatic.

A bit fuzzy and a bit disappointing

Oggl: another assault on Fortress Instagram

rugfoot — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:19:00 +0100

It all happened so quickly. Well, the acceptance of my expression of interest in joining Hipstamatic’s new photo-sharing app, Oggl, did. Of course, the actual launch of the platform was about 2 years late. The mobile world would have been very different if Hipstamatic had got there first. It seems only yesterday I was saying the same thing about the new Flickr mobile app.

So what do we think of it? First of all, there’s still a certain hipsta elitism about it. Membership is being released only slowly (via invites) although I’m sure that’s partly because they want to go easy on their servers at first (there is early talk of crashes). But already we are hearing grumbles (understandably) from Hipstamatic “customers” who haven’t yet received invites. Also, the purity of the hipsta filters is being preserved by uploads only being allowed from the app’s own camera roll. So no cropping out those frames or Snapseed-messing with the saturation. There is some surprise that the old Hipstamatic app and Oggl haven’t been connected (so you can’t upload your old Hipsta prints) but this might come in the next upgrade. The photos you take in Oggl save to your camera roll, which really means there’s not much point shooting in the old app anymore. Unless, of course, if you were silly enough to have bought any of those daft “camera cases”.

I know I bang on about resolution. And alas Oggl exports at a rather low 640x640. What’s worse, you can’t manage your photos via your camera roll. The best you can do is via one of the other platforms you can parallel post to (eg Flickr) but that’s quite fiddly. I do like the curation idea. “You can’t curate your own photos” the app tells me as I try to boost my own popularity. We’re hearing the word curation a lot now in the mobile photography world so maybe Hipstamatic have tapped into the zeitgeist. Curation seems to be like an uber-like you can give people’s photos (I haven’t got one yet). It also means you mix up other people’s photos amongst your own Collection, which is kind of nice. I also love the ease with which you can switch “lenses” and “films” and even preview their effects before shooting and copy other people’s combos. And the app itself is super slick, as you would expect from a Hipsta.

So this is another serious assault on Fortress Instagram, which has already taken a bit of a battering from first Eyeem, then Flickr and later a variety of other smaller assailants. How long can it hold out?

Assault on Fortress Instagram!

Is it just the robots that use tags on Instagram?

rugfoot — Thu, 09 May 2013 09:14:19 +0100

Surely real people will stop using tags on Instagram soon. Do people actually still use tags even? Who actually sits down and says to themselves: I’m going to have a look through the #iphoneart stream and see what wonderful creations have been posted up on Instagram recently? Well this muppet just did. What did I find? I found a hairy chested man in a baseball cap, a very small tortoise in someone’s hand, lots of pictures of blossom, lots of messages urging me to Get More Followers (I’m trying), dogs, cats, Justin Beiber and not many pictures that you could consider “iphone art”. We know what’s going on there, don’t we? People just copy and paste huge chunks of tags into their pictures without any thought for how relevant they are.

But what if you actually are interested in looking at iphone art pictures? How do you spare your eyes the indignity of all those Justin Beiber pictures? Well here’s an idea: go to Flickr and look through the iphone art group. No Justin Beiber or hairy-chested men. That’s because the group is curated. In other words, a real human is making sure there’s no rubbish. And if you think you can contribute to the iphone art canon, you can apply to join the group.

As I blogged a while back, you can actually hire a robot to do tagging for you. And in answer to my own question: yes, it seems people do still use tags, because Instabutler does still get you lots of likes (hardly any followers though). Or does it? Maybe other robots are searching the tags and automatically giving those pictures tags? Will Instagram activity end up being entirely fuelled by robots in a few years time?

Are there any humans still out there?

Hipstamatic sunglasses

rugfoot — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:47:00 +0100

Google have been talking about bringing out glasses that promise you a ticker feed of stock prices from New York in the left-side of your peripheral vision. Oh yipee. Much better would be if Hipstamatic brought out glasses that replicated some of their fantastic filters. See such a hipper world world through a Jimmy + Dream Canvas combo! Go back in time with the B-type + Tinto combo! You may be multi-billionaires and be able to avoid paying any tax anywhere, but that would be so much cooler, Google.

After you’ve been using a particular Hipstamatic combo for a while, it’s like walking around with a pair of strong sun glasses on. The colours are richer, the world is more contrasted, there’s a touch of cool about everything. The actual sunglasses that I wear have prescription lenses, which means they also give me a bit of definition, which means they really do give me a different vision/version of reality, a hyper reality. Whenever I take them off, I feel a mild sense of disappointment (and lack of clarity) in the face of the reality of… reality. And I often get the same sense of let-down when I take a photo with the native iphone camera.

As I blogged before, the “lenses and films” etc are really just filters that you stack. They may be loosely based on old films and lenses but I’m not sure how historically accurate they are. I’d love to see their research. Anyway, they can be as historically accurate as Eroll Flynn’s portrayal of Robin Hood for all I care, they’re bloody brilliant. Let me know when you bring out those glasses.

Hipstamatic sunglasses: better than Google goggles

The man who doesn't know what Instagram is

rugfoot — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0100

William Eggleston has no idea what (or who) Instagram is. He revealed this and a very limited number of other things in a recent interview with an illustrious panel of photographic luminaries published in The Independent.

If you’re a fan of Eggleston’s work you might also be the sort of person who puts on one of Schoenburg’s records and has a jig around the kitchen. Or are first in the queue when your local Odeon is re-running The Sorrow and the Pity. His work isn’t what you’d call chocolate-box. His most famous photo is of a light bulb. Please. There is the tiniest suspicion that people in the world of photography daren’t say anything against him for fear of being ridiculed by their peers. Yes, I get his use of colour within the context of a fine-art photography previously dominated by black and white. Yes, I get his disdain for cliched subjects. And I guess that if you spend enough time studying something, yes, you probably get bored of those chocolate box pictures of quaint cottages or horses running on beaches. If you’re on Instagram you can relate to that right, having clocked up your 1,000th view of a backlit jumpstagram? Just as well he doesn’t know what it is.

It’s the same with those architects. I’m with Prince Charles on this one. The Trellick Tower may be a listed building but does its design perhaps have anything to do with the locals’ nickname for it, Jumpers Tower, owing to the number of people who have, yes, jumped off it? Could its brutal post-modern lines and unrelentingly concrete have something to do with those people wanting to kill themselves?

So maybe I haven’t been looking at photos enough down the years. The thing is most of Eggleston’s photos are just a bit boring to look at. Of course there’s no objective arbiter of photography (and there’s also no accounting for taste) so why do journalists call people like Eggleston the “world’s greatest”? And if he wins a prize we all know that prize organisers will usually have some self-serving reason for their decisions. So why do so many people spend so much time, devote so much energy and write so many articles about his work? Oops there’s another one.

I’m with Prince Charles

Let the kids have the kameraz!

rugfoot — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 10:33:00 +0100

I’d almost forgotten about the app Action Shot. The easiest way to explain what it does is to look at the photo shown here.

You get the idea? I remembered it the other day because I was invited by Sport England to take some photos of one of their Sportivate initiatives, a group of Free Runners (a sport also known as Parcourt, or Parkour in its cooler version) and I thought it would work a treat.

The way you take a photo with it is to hold your camera still and let your subject jump/skateboard/fly from one end of your frame to the other. The app takes a number of shots in burst mode and you decide which ones you’d like to include in your final frame. You could achieve the same result by using an app like Quick Camera and then blending the results. (Quick Camera has the advantage over other apps, like Camera+, which also have a burst mode, that it delivers high-resolution images.) You could then use an app like Blender to merge your best shots into one. But that would be quite a long and tricky process. Action Shot effectively gives you a macro that takes those steps for you. A bit of finger dabbing on your screen and, hey presto, you have a pretty cool-looking pic to impress your skateboarding emo mates with.

Part of Sport England’s thinking with asking me to cover these events with the iphone camera is to show the kids that they could take photos of the sports they’re doing with their own smart phones. Action Shot is a great example of this sort of empowerment.

Become a filter designer

rugfoot — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:39:00 +0100

I recently did a photo shoot for Sport England. I took about 150 photos and narrowed my final selection down to around 30. Then I wanted to app them. Yes, all of them. As we’ve established many times before, apps were put on this earth to be used and the iphone camera takes pretty dull photos. So I wanted to app these photos. But I’d also had quite a hard day and I wanted to go home. Either I submit fairly uninspiring photos or I go through all 30 one by one and edit each one manually. Since this sort of shoot is probably the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done, I decided it was in my interests to edit each one manually. So using Snapseed: open, drama (I know), sharpen, brighten, saturation, subtle vignette. To keep a consistent style, I gave most of the photos very similar edits.

When I got home I did some research and discovered I could have saved myself some work. Filter Storm allows you to create custom presets, or automations, as it calls them. So, if you have 4 or 5 edits that you apply over and over, you can save those steps as one single preset. It’s a great time-saving way of not having to repeatedly go through the same steps. I then discovered that you can do the same thing in another app, Photo Toaster. There may also be other apps that allow you to do this. For me though, this was new and amazing.

The world of iphoneography has often been criticised for being “just a bunch of filters”. With custom presets though, you take creative control of your images. You decide the exact look of your photos. You effectively become a filter designer.

I call this my Cheerleader filter

What's the story with Backspaces?

rugfoot — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:57:17 +0100

I’ve been going to support my team Luton Town on and off for many years. Last week was the last home match of the season. It had been a terrible season. We’re in the fifth tier of the English league system but used to play in the very top league against Manchester United and Chelsea. So whenever the press talk about Luton, the narrative is that of a club that has fallen hard times, seen better days, hankering after former glories.

The narrative. That made me think of this new app I’ve been using: Backspaces. It’s all about narratives, or stories. So as I caught the train to Luton last Thursday, I thought I’d try and put together a little story about Luton Town Football Club. Perhaps I’d take that “former glories” angle, or maybe something more personal. And perhaps I’d just tell people a few things about my football club. That was as far as I planned the story.

If you’re following Google Maps to find Luton’s ground, you go up a street of tightly-packed terraced housing and you might wonder where a football stadium is going to fit in. It suddenly appears, seemingly out of no-where, at the end of the road, surrounded on three sides by houses, the other side by a main road. Many of these grounds are disappearing from England as clubs move to new more comfortable out-of-town grounds. This became my first story. Then I went for a drink at the Eric Morecombe Suite, a pre-match club for season-ticket holders only. Who was Eric Morecombe? He became my next story. After a drink there, we made our way to the narrow turnstiles. A sign warned supporters to expect to be searched. It reminded me of the bad-old days of 80s hooliganism. Another picture, another story. At every turn, I found stories, little gems of information, some amusing, some poignant.

The Backspaces app is a real eye-opener. Quite literally. Putting together a series of photos with text is a new way of approaching photography. It allows us to add more meaning to our photos, to be more personal, to tell our stories. To see this particular story, click here.

What’s the story with these two guys?

Jowls like a clean-shaven gerbil

rugfoot — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:00:21 +0100

I’m going on a diet. Spring has sprung and summer is on its way and I’ve got a couple of new tee shirts with some particularly funny things on them that I’d like to wear in the summer festivals without having to hold my breath the whole time. In the iphoneography world, if you don’t like the way you look, there’s an app for it. In fact, there are quite a few. In my case, perhaps the one I need is Elasticam. Have a slight belt-overhang? Just a bit too barrell-chested? Jowls making you look a bit like a clean-shaven gerbil? This is the app for you. Simply choose the area you want to shrink and watch the pounds disappear. You can go a bit surreal with it too and stretch out objects like a Dali dreamscape. If it’s the wrinkles rather than the pounds that you want to see disappear, there’s a range of apps for that too, like Beautify, that claim to give you a digital make-over. Or want to try out a new hair colour before splashing out on the real thing? Try Clairol’s (free!) hair-colouring app.

But perhaps because a big reason for a lot of people taking pictures is not to make themselves look good but rather to make their friends and family look silly, there seem to be more apps that go in the opposite direction, vanity-wise. So if you tap in “fat” to the search field of the app store, you will find a frighteningly large number of apps that give your victims that classic gerbil look by filling out their cheeks and expanding their neck to gross effect. And just a bit further along the same app store shelf you will find apps such as Oldify, which makes a face sag, wrinkles look more creased and hair go greyer. And then on the shelf above, we find apps such as Wobble. An app only really worth its $0.99 after a few drinks down the pub, you choose the area of a photo that you want to wobble (eg your friend’s nose) and (have you guessed it yet?), yes, it makes it wobble.

So on the first day of my diet I will be trying to steer clear of the sweets section of the supermarket today - though after trying out some of these apps, I might also have to start trying to avoid the App Store for a few days too.

I wish I hadn’t spent that $0.99

I owe you one Instagram

rugfoot — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:44:00 +0100

I recently read an article by Charlie Sorrel recognising the contribution that Instagram had made to his own photography. I too must pay homage and give thanks. About a year ago, I became a professional photographer and I honestly don’t think I would have done it without Instagram.

Over the last two and half years of my Instagramming I think I’ve honed my photographic skills and learnt an enormous amount about photography. In recent months, I’ve been critical of Instagram (see here, here or here for examples). But in the early days, when it was just the four of them feeding the meter to keep the server running, I had a lot of good things to say about them (see here, here and here). Like Charlie, Instagram suddenly gave photography a purpose for me. Suddenly I had a reason to seek out an interesting shot and then take the time and effort to edit it. And so I had my photographic eye switched on nearly all the time, so I saw more photos, took more photos and crafted more photos. And so I got better at it. And I also took a lot of inspiration from other people and borrowed (or stole) a lot of ideas from some amazingly creative people.

Yes, they got incredibly rich, but they gave a lot of people (like me) a lot. So fair dos, win-win. And a heartfelt thanks. You never replied to any of my emails or ever commented on any of my blogs and I gave up @-ing you on Twitter after a while, but that’s cool, you’re busy people, running a busy (and highly successful) business. You did a great job and we will not forget you.

We will not forget

Follow me follow you

rugfoot — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:56:27 +0100

There’s no easy way to say this. If you start following me on Instagram, I won’t necessarily follow you back. According to Statigram, my latest weekly follower balance is minus 9. I look through the long list of people who unfollowed me and can only say sorry @spacecabbage, apologies @puddlegram and what can I say @instagetpopular (you didn’t). And I can only suspect that a lot of those people were expecting a follow-back and dumped me when they didn’t get one.

And there’s no easy way to say this without sounding slightly arrogant but because I do actually like to check my followings’ photos from time to time, I don’t want to increase the number of people I follow by much more than 400. There are only so many hours in the day.

While I have no compunctions about not following people who start following me, I think perhaps my English politeness means I find it very difficult to unfollow people on Instagram who follow me already - even if I’m not that mad keen on their photos. I find it especially difficult in two cases: if I’m likely to bump into them in real life (can you imagine the embarrassment?) or if they have, at some point in the early days, been kind enough to follow me and are still following me despite everything.

And so if I really find someone new that I want to follow, I have to look hard to find one of my followings to elbow out to make room for them. But sometimes the decision is made easy for me.

When I started out on Instagram I discovered Statigram and its insta-statistics. At that time, they told you who had recently followed you but not who had unfollowed you. I wrote them an email and suggested people might like to know this information. They wrote back and said thank you for my suggestion but they didn’t want to appeal to people’s more cynical instincts. A few months later they created a “recently unfollowed” section. They also show followings who don’t follow you back (I call it the “endangered list”)

So, now if there’s someone who I might bump into or who followed me years ago but who has finally had enough of me appears on this list and I don’t like their photos much I jump at the chance to give them the chop with a completely clear conscience.

That said, I’m checking my Instagram feed less and less these days and I sometimes wonder what the point of it all is.

Unfollow unfollow unfollow…

Are you self-obsessed?

rugfoot — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:45:22 +0100

Are you a bit self-obsessed? Well, like my Mum always used to say if I said “very unique”, I’m not sure you can be “a bit” self-obsessed. But let’s go with it. And do you take photos? If your answers are yes and yes, you’ve probably taken a “selfie”. Or in highfalutin parlance, a self-portrait. Or in simple terms, a picture of yourself. With most smart phones, just flip the lens and you can line yourself up and make sure you’re pulling a really sexy pout.

An article in The Guardian this week highlighted the rise of the selfie. In it, Bim Adewunmi says selfies are so popular, especially with celebs, because they are easy and you are in control of the photo. “I love selfies. And I am not alone.” she says. Well, I’m not that keen on doing selfies myself actually. Thinking about it, though, it would make a difference if I was a lot better looking and younger. If you’ve got a nice face, then just like any other nice-looking thing, you probably want to take a photo of it. If not, then not. Another reason I’m probably not that bothered is that I’m married. Especially if you’re good looking, free and single, a selfie is a great way of putting yourself in the match-making shop window. Surely it’s no coincidence that selfies are most popular amongst pubescent teens?

But perhaps a more profound theory for the popularity of the selfie (and here my degree in philosophy is finally coming in handy) has something in common with the popularity of the food image. I previously speculated (move over Alain de Botton!) that people like taking pictures of their food because they want to reassure themselves, in some primeval way, of their continued survival. In the same way, don’t people take pictures of themselves just to tell themselves that they exist? This is me. I am alive. I pout therefore I am.

I don’t do many selfies

Where is Instagram now?

rugfoot — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:01:00 +0100

I’m putting the final touches to my advanced iphoneography group (AiG) workshop, which starts next Monday. Most of the students attended one of my introductory courses which were launched in February 2012, which I’m still running, now with the British Journal of Photography. When I started the course, we used Instagram as a photo sharing app. This time, we’ll be using Flickr. Why so?

The hegemony of Instagram has been broken and there are now a lot more options out there. A couple of years ago, the choice was basically between Instagram or Streamzoo. Now, Eyeem has come on leaps and bounds with its cool UI, Flickr has launched a smart full-res-upload app and there are some exciting new variations on the photo sharing theme such as Path, which limits your follower numbers to fifty, or Backspaces, which allows you to take your time and present sets of themed photos, or stories, accompanied (if you like) by words.

While all the apps around it were enriching, adapting and improving, the Instagram app is much as it was a year ago. Of course, its simplicity was always its strong point and it’s still difficult to break such an easy habit, but people are getting tired of posting their pics in the same old way.

When Instagram started out it was as kooky as its eye-worryingly naff logo. The logo hasn’t changed, but the company has. It’s now a big corporation owned by shareholders (through its publically owned proprietor Facebook) sitting in the financial centres of the world. Then it tried to pull a fast one on its users with its revised TOS, confirming its general indifference to its own user community. It started out sticking it to the Man, now it is the Man.

Instagram’s creation of super users through its suggested user list was a clever way of attracting media attention, encouraging businesses to take an interest in the platform and all the time boosting its user figures. But now it’s looking like a cheap trick as people wise up to the fact that most of those super users are purely of Instagram’s own making to serve Instagram’s own business agenda, which (post Facebook purchase) it did.

To be fair, Instagram never pretended to be a place for interesting photography. But through a lack of choice, people who were interested in this new iphoneography genre adopted it for their work. Now there are other options, now they’ve seen Instagram’s true colours and now they’re looking for more in an app, they’ve started to move on.

Bored of Instagram?

Brains and robots

rugfoot — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:00:23 +0100

It’s funny how our brains retain little snippets of information or opinions as we trawl from Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to Bckflip, but then we can’t remember where we heard them. Which is a roundabout way of me saying that I read something interesting that I’m going to tell you but that I’m not a good enough journalist (well I’m not a journalist full stop) to tell you what my sources are. So apologies in advance to whoever it was who said what I’m about to relay to you. I’m an iphoneographer not a journalist.

What I heard was someone’s view that the future of Twitter will be various robots talking to other various robots. I didn’t quite understand this at first but then as I scheduled a string of promotional Tweets about my upcoming advanced iPhoneography workshops (three places still available!), I realised that I was actually programming my own “robot”. And one of the robots that my robot would address, I realised this morning, was currently bombarding me with a string of tweets that created an orange streak in the iphoggy column of my Tweetdeck dashboard. My aim in scheduling my robot’s tweets was to avoid annoying my followers by blanket-bombing them with information. Of course, each tweet was also intended to entertain or amuse in some modest way, so they were automated only in their timing, not their drafting. I’d only followed this particular Twitter account, let’s call them Orange, because they had somehow dug out a photo that I’d uploaded to the excellent P1xels iphone art gallery and then tweeted it. Being a well brought up (but slightly naive in the ways of social media) sort of person, I gracefully drafted a thank-you tweet for Orange. Needless to say, I didn’t get a reply. Unlike Orange, I’ve actually taught my robot to have some manners and so if you follow me on Twitter, you will receive an automatic thank-you tweet. But then the streak of Orange currently besmirching a quarter of my Tweet deck dashboard reminded me that a lot of robots are quite rude. And I do know that some people find my automated thank-you a form of inverted rudeness.

So if you’ve reached this far in this column, I hope you enjoyed it and I’d like to gracefully (and personally) thank you. From one brain to another.

Dancing robots

It's better by train

rugfoot — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:35:24 +0000

I took my wife out for a driving lesson one late Sunday afternoon a while back. As we were doing a three-point turn on a deserted Ealing Common, she put her foot on the wrong pedal (as an automatic car, it was a 50-50 call) and drove the car into a tree. It was a write-off. Though I didn’t mind too much. “I’ll be dining off this one for years”, I laughed (I didn’t think I’d be blogging about it too). We didn’t buy a replacement car and as a result we’ve been using the trains quite a lot.

I get a schoolboy thrill whenever I get on a train. It feels like I’m going on a sort of adventure. And part of that thrill is the prospect of getting some good photos through the window. For many reasons, sitting on a train is fantastic for taking photos. A large part of getting an interesting photo, is finding an interesting perspective and an interesting subject. A seat on a train is a rare perspective on an ever-changing subject. As trains leave London, often you’re high up and see down onto streets or into people’s houses; as you pass through the countryside, you see huge expansive landscapes; as you go through industrial estates, you see decaying factories and strange machinery. There’s a feast for Cartier-Bressonian lovers of shapes and geometry. Chimney stacks make triangles with overhead cables, craggy trees stand stark against rolling hills, Victorian tunnel arches flash by. And all the scenes have those receding lines that we all love. If you want a bit of weird in your photos, there are reflections and blemishes on the windows that you can play with. And if you’re a people person, take a stroll to the buffet car where you can get some sneaky face shots as you pretend to listen to your voicemail, or if you’re lucky someone interesting will get on at Leicester and sit right in front of you.

And taking photos on a train tests one of the key skills of any type of photography: capturing the moment. If you haven’t got your app open and ready to fire when the train passes a distant field of tiny sheep, you’ll miss it.

So if your wife writes off your car, look on the bright side. You’ll have an interesting story to tell and you might get a few interesting photos.

They got on at Leicester

Get some perspective

rugfoot — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:18:00 +0000

Just this week my friend and iphoneographic omnipresent Misho Baranovic launched an app that allows you to straighten the lines in a photo. Imagine you’re on the pavement and you’re looking up taking a photo of a building. In the photo, the sides of the building aren’t parallel with the frame of the photo, they slope inwards as they go up. The app allows you to make them parallel with each other and with the sides of the frame. It picks up something an app called Genius Scan already did (as do others), but it does it much better. It has an amazing in-screen function, which allows you to see what you’re going to get when you take the photo after adjusting your perspective.

One of the things I liked about Genius Scan is that people were using it for something it wasn’t intended for. And I think I’ve probably used Perspective Correct for something it wasn’t intended for already. Last night I was taking photos of a a really great band called Yo La Tengo at the Barbican Hall in London and when I got home I got a shot that I liked but which I wanted to straighten out. I hadn’t been able to get right in front of the middle of the stage so the shot was at a bit of an angle. Here’s the shot:

And the thing I don’t think this app is meant to be used for is to process DSLR photos. I don’t know if you you can do this with Photoshop but if you can I didn’t know how to so I used Perspective Correct. To get this image:

The perceptive ones amongst you will have spotted that a corner (bottom right) has appeared that wasn’t there before. That’s right, I used Touch Retouch to clone it in. An app that would also work well filling out the gaps left with the perspective adjustment would be Anti-Crop. I suggested to Misho he should form an all-conquering app alliance with these two as they have awesome capabilities in combination.

So far, all the reviews I’ve seen of this app talk about “correcting” perspective. And the app will be great at allowing us to tweak our images to achieve perfectly harmonious compositions. But I think it can be used for much more. I’m looking forward to seeing some images where it has been used not to correct but to distort perspective. Over to you.

When meta data goes missing

rugfoot — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:25:00 +0000

An interesting article in the British Journal of Photography highlighted a recent piece of research that showed that you could lose some of your meta data when you upload photos to some platforms. When I started taking photos professionally I was surprised how much meta data you have to add to photos: information about the subject, who owns the photo, who the photo is licensed to, an image description, phone numbers, emails, etc. Of course, when you post a mobile photo to a platform, you don’t normally add in meta data. But chances are your camera will add meta data automatically: such things are location, shutter speed, file size, pixels, etc. You can use an app like Lab to see this data.

We already knew that uploading photos to some platforms reduced their sizes. So they’re no good as back-ups because if you download your own photos back from the platform, you’ll get much smaller versions. But this research shows that can also lose meta data when you upload your photo. The researchers say the friendliest platforms are Google+ and Dropbox and the worst are Facebook and Flickr. To be fair to Flickr, though, the researchers point out they only tested a free Flickr account. I tried out a pro account and all the meta data are preserved. For some odd reason, though, the researchers didn’t look at one of the biggest photo sharing platforms of them all, Instagram. Well, actually, the reason might be that Instagram isn’t meant to be a storage platform (they state it explicitly in their TOS). But of course you can download back your Instagram photos from spin-off platforms like Statigram. So I did my own test just in case. And no surprise, the file came back with zero meta data, not even geo tags.

So what does this all mean and should we get annoyed? The news adds to the feeling - already quite strong after the Instagram furore - that the platforms are stealing our photos. The meta data includes ownership info and the platforms remove it. If you’re a professional photographer, maybe you should be worried. But then if you’re a professional photographer, you probably shouldn’t be uploading your professional photos to social media platforms.

Is the meta data still there?

I heard it through the (social media) grapevine

rugfoot — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:02:12 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of being invited to visit Ostende by that city’s tourist board. I know all the jokes about Belgium, but I’m really looking forward to it. I’m a fan of Belgium. If I ever find myself in a Karaoke bar that does Jacques Brel’s Plat Pays, I’m on stage in a shot. Not very likely, I know. Though perhaps more likely in Ostend. I will ask the tourist board if they know of any.

The visit is specifically to promote a new tour commemorating the fact that Marvin Gaye once lived there for a while (nearly a year so far as I can work out). There I’ve said it. This is a sponsored post. I have disclosed a material connection in accordance with US government guidelines on endorsements and Womma best practice recommendations on word of mouth marketing. Basically if someone is induced to tweet, blog or post photos (in exchange for money or trips to Ostend) they should tell their followers. And by writing this piece, I discharge one of the conditions of the trip. And they’ll actually probably get another one out of me after the trip as it sounds like a fascinating story and a lovely place for taking photos.

The typical narrative of the Marvin Gaye sejour in Ostende is one of contrasting a fast-living coke-sniffing superstar with a seemingly sleepy seaside town in one of the world’s most unexotic countries. So although I’m absolutely delighted to be invited, it feels like I’m on the bottom rung of a very tall social media ladder in terms of freebies. My influencer statistics bear this out. I was asked to fill out a form, listing my various social media following numbers and the page views of my website, iphoggy.com. My follower numbers just about get into four digits thanks to Instagram, but I couldn’t quite scrape together five figures of visits to my website. I heard of someone the other day who had 1.5 million followers on Google+. I didn’t even know Google+ was still going. And I have many good friends who were blessed with a place on Instagram’s suggested user list and so have hundreds of thousands of followers. But, as I’m sure my dear readers and Instagram followers are saying at this very moment: never mind the quantity feel the quality. Be reassured Ostend Tourist Board.

Going to the seaside