Monet In Moloka`i

Digital Diva here. We just finished a fabulous week long seminar on our home island, See The Light taught by the Digital Dude himself, Dewitt Jones, with Jonathan Kingston, and Rikki Cooke. Of course, my iPhone got as much workout as my other cameras. A tasty new app the Dude told me about called MobileMonet has brought new light to some old favorite locations and subjects. For more about this past week's photo extravaganza, check out Jonathan's blog; The Nomadic Photographer.

Holy HDR, Batman!

Digital Dude here. Just found one of the coolest apps ever. TrueHDR. It's Photomatix for the iPhone and it is destined to help us all make some exceptional photos. I only downloaded it last night so I haven't been able to use it anywhere except my front yard but I had to share the results. Here's what you do ---

Take one photo where you touch and focus on a darker area in the composition. The camera in the iPhone will expose for that area and the result will be a shot where the shadow are properly exposed and the highlights burned out. Here's such a shot -



Take a second photo and touch on a lighter area of the composition. Here the highlights will be properly exposed and shadow will be blocked up. Yes, here is that shot -



Now open TrueHDR and choose both these photos from your Camera Roll. TrueHDR will now align the two photos, blend them into an HDR image, and then Tone Map them to give you a resulting image with expanded dynamic range where both the shadows and highlights are properly exposed! Here it is -



If you want to take it one step further. Open this image in IFlashReady and reflash it with "HighFlash" which is actually another faux HDR process. Give it some noise reduction and sharpening in PhotForge and, Oh My, look what we have!



Give it a try. I'm off to shoot more images....

{Note: Just click on any photo to see it larger.}

Animoto!

Hi, Digital Dude here with a fabulous new site for you to check out. It's called Animoto and it makes incredible slide shows out of your images, be they from the iPhone or your big boy cameras. Pay a small fee ($30 per year), upload your images, choose their music or upload your own. Click! And they put together a spectacular graphic slide show in sync with the audio. You can play it on the net at their site, upload it to Youtube, or download a high resolution file for making into a DVD. Click above and check it out for yourself. This is a show I made using some of my favorite iPhone images. Let me know what you think! (If you should choose to sign up for Animoto use my referral code: uextanqo and you will get $5 off)

Lockton Loaded: iPhone Art That’s All In The Family

Yep that’s right! A whole family of iPhone artists has just shared some images with us! Check these out:

Lindsay Lockton took this wild photo by shooting subsequent photos displayed on iPhones - kind of a mirror reflected in a mirror reflected in a mirror......... How creative is that?



Her Mom, Kelly, shot this fabulous photo of cowboys and proceeded to tweak it in the following apps:
1st- Perfectly Clear to brighten up the picture, added more color vibrancy and over sharpened a bit.
2nd - PhotoForge to crop, adjusted the Vibrance again and "Posterized" it.
3rd - Photogene to frame it.
4th - ArtCamera, used the crumpled paper filter.



And dad Ron, the most recent iPhone convert in the family, “shot and shocked” this photo of Kansas City's autumnal splendor. He calls it simply “Midwest in Fall.”



The Lockton family by their own description have become official iPhone art addicts. And we’re so happy they are.

Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

The Digital Dude and Digital Diva were in Southern CA for Labor Day weekend. Standing on Santa Monica pier, the Dude (Dewitt) shot crosses on the sand representing those lost in the war. He combined them in the Double Exposure app with a shot of daisies for this haunting image that he titled "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?"

The American Airport - A Short iPhone Odyssey

What a great day I had yesterday flying home from Minneapolis. Hard to believe as I am a ardent hater of airports. But my iPhone has changed all that. I started taking pixs of traveler's quiet desperation and then began to tweek. Ended up using the Picasso filter on the ArtCamera application to come up with a look that seemed a little more Francis Bacon than Picasso, but nevertheless gave the photos a flattened posterization that dehumanized them, much the way an airports dehumanizes us all. Enjoy! -- dewitt

Flights of Fancy from the Digital Dude

Dewitt is traveling today - here's some of what he's come up with whilst eastbound:







I'm sure he'll give the details of how he did these from the road - wait for it..........