The Bare Bones of iPhone Photography

Hey there, Digital Diva here. One of my favorite artists is Georgia O'Keeffe. I've done some iPhone photos of abstracted flowers as homage to her paintings where I use Gooey Faces to "melt" the blossoms into pure shapes.

So when I came across this cow skull nailed to a post at Hui Hoolana during a recent photo seminar, it was all over.

Here's the straight photo; busy background, tilted awkwardly, not too interesting. Yet.
Straightened the skull in Photogene. Blurred out the background in Photoforge. Double exposed with abstract color pattern in DXP.
Sepia in Tiffen Cool FX, Double expose in DXP with background of abstracted lines.
Sketchmee? Tiffen Cool FX black and white.
Painted background to rust color and added border in EdgePix (sadly no longer available.)
Lightened, toned and bordered in VintageScene app.
And my favorite done in Vintage Scene with a little embossing of the skull itself done in TouchUp.

High Dynamic Range from PRO HDR app

Digital Diva here. I just can't believe what some of these apps can do (along with the iPhone herself). The Dude and I were walking through a Sedona, Arizona canyon a couple months back. We came upon one of those impossible lighting situations that is now possible thanks to the great HDR apps.

By tapping on a given spot on your iPhone, you can tell it where to focus and where to figure exposure. So for the first photo I tapped on the highlight in the far canyon wall that was harshly lit. So you can see that but not much else. For the second shot, I tapped on the dark shadows in the creek area but the highlights then blew out. Two really poor exposures overall, because there's just too many stops of exposure to hold it.

Enter PRo HDR app and the third photo shows the combined HDR photo. I added a little warmth, sharpness, and saturation in Photoforge and Iris apps. (I also like TrueHDr app for some images - just a trial and error approach seems to work for some images.)

HDR On The Prairie at Ballyneal

Digital Diva here with a travelogue piece on Ballyneal Golf Club. On a recent trip to Colorado, two hours outside of Denver on a magic golf course in the middle of nowhere (which is really SOMEWHERE special) the Dude and I played golf with 4 other dear photographer friends. And of course, documented the experience with our phones. And the Dude went full on HDR.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography has a specific look to it - sometimes I like it; sometimes I think it looks over the top. Still, I like when we can make the iPhone and other cameras "see" as much as our eyes do.

Dewitt used mostly True HDR app to put two exposures together. He tapped the phone in the shadows to open up detail and then tapped the phone on a highlight to expose properly for it. The resultant two images worked not at all until combined in True HDR.

(And news flash, I hear the new OS for iPHone is due out soon - which will have HDR capability built into the OS. Woo - hoo. Can't wait to try it.)








And if you want to see some really beautiful images by professional photographers Dick Durrance and Sue Drinker, check out the Ballyneal site.

Vintage Seen

Digital Diva here. One of my new favorite apps is called Vintage Scene. It allows for all kinds of grungifying to antique your iPhone photo art. This first shot is of Smileys Bar in Bolinas CA. It lends itself perfectly to this aging technique.


This was a relatively crappy shot of a tree with sun starring through it; was all blocked up and I opened the shadows and decreased the contrast in Photoforge, creating a crappy low contrast shot. Ah, but all is not lost. I knew when I took it that it would make a great antique looking image.

My handsome, talented son, Brian Kavanaugh Jones as he photographed Lake Tahoe, and I photographed him. No, this is not 1954, it was a couple of weeks ago.
Here in Lake Tahoe, a group of us have a picnic on the beach every Tuesday night. This forces us to go to the beach, because no matter where you live, it's easy to forget to partake of the great places we live unless of course we have company. After sunset, we spotted the M.S. Dixie paddlewheeler boat cruising across the lake. A perfect subject for grunging - it seems like it is from another century.

Finally, the Ahwahnee Hotel's dining room in Yosemite is as gorgeous and timeless today as it was when it opened in 1927.

Best Straight iPhone Shot Ever!

Digital Diva here with the best straight iPhone shot ever. No photoshop, no cool iPhone apps. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Except maybe supernatural or divine creation having nothing to do with the photographer. The Dude gave a coffee cup to his Diva for Christmas this year that says "Dog Mom" on it and has a ring of paw prints on its inner circumference. I zapped a cup of coffee in the microwave and pulled it out to find this perfect paw print in bubbles on top. When I hollered to the Digital Dude to come look, he gasped and said "Did you get a picture of it?" I did. Proving that the Best Camera truly is the one you have with you. Ahhhhhh, the paws that refreshes.

Through The Looking Glass

Digital Diva here with some questions to ponder. What is our personal creative vision? What themes continually drive our photographic expression? Who are we as artists?

Having just finished a fabulous photo seminar here on Molokai called "Rekindling The Creative Spirit" co-taught by Dewitt Jones, Rikki Cooke, Theresa Airey, and Jonathan Kingston, the Diva may be getting closer to an answer for herself. This annual event fills participants and instructors with inspiration and new techniques/ideas for going further in our photos. We come away rejuvenated; our photography gains new life.

Still, when we examine the themes that continually show up in our image-making, even as we explore new creative options, we may discover clues to an artistic identity; our photo vision if you will.

I gave a slide show for the class combining images from 15 years ago (film, what a concept), digital images from the last year and a half, and more recent iPhone images. All these photo media had distinct commonalities. My unifying themes were and are abstraction, simplicity, and other realities. With "other realities" taking top billing. I've always been captivated by the underlying realities that a camera can see even when we can't. Slow shutter speeds, camera movement, multiple exposure continue to dominate how I "see".

Can you look back and find some of your themes? What attracts you again and again photographically? As Rikki Cooke says, "What's turning your head?"

Here are a couple of iPhone photo art images that turned my head. Or were in my head. Or both.

Tooning Up With Color in Toonpaint

Hi all. Digital Diva back as promised with color added to iPhone Toonpaint images. My favorite method is to use DXP, a double exposure app, and combine the original color image with the Toonpaint black and white. I like using DXP because it has multiple blend modes, which can change the color added from vibrant like the sunflower below...

to just a hint of color as in this pale pink freesia...

to a more half and half blend as in this torch ginger...

to a totally "unreal" but wonderful color image like this inverted vase and flowers using the Difference blend mode in DXP. Just experiment and find out what blend modes work best with with images for you.

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.}

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.

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