Category: Photography

Best B&W Photo Apps for iOS

I am an unashamed fan of black and white photography. Probably because of my background (I was introduced to serious photography by a college professor who worked in large format and told me about Ansel Adams), I find it easier to visualize shapes and forms in monochrome than I do to anticipate how to handle color.

PuppehWhile I own several cameras (a Contax G1 and a Canon G12 among them), the one camera that’s always with me is the one that’s built into my iPhone. There are tons of great camera apps available for iOS, but relatively few that are geared towards B&W photography. Many apps have a “filter” for B&W, but they don’t actually let you shoot in B&W by default. And most of those filters do things beyond simply converting the image to B&W. Smugmug’s Camera Awesome, for example, has default filters, but they add textures and vignetting that seriously detract from the image. Any app that requires post-processing to achieve B&W didn’t make my list.

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Pile up the photos

PhotoPile.me is a really cool site that lets you view all of your Instagram photos at once. Ok, maybe not all of them, but a nice big pile of them that’s really quite striking. Here’s mine (click through to see the live site):

Very cool (at least if you use Instagram).

Remembering Katrina

Waterlogged school buses in New Orleans, August 2005
Waterlogged school buses in New Orleans, August 2005 (photo by Allan Campbell)

Approximately five years ago, one of the most devastating natural(?) disasters in US history occurred. Early on the morning of August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina plowed into the Mississippi river delta and up towards New Orleans.

The first reports seemed to indicate that the city had survived relatively unscathed. But an hour or so later, the world began to receive reports that the levees, long viewed as the weakest part of New Orlean’s hurricane defensive shield, had begun to fail, and the city was filling with water.

The story is fairly well known, but I had a small part in the midst of it. At the time, I was an engineer for Yahoo! News, and Katrina rapidly became the top story. We watched as our traffic doubled, then tripled, then quintupled our normal daily rate. And it stayed at that level, with little variance, for the next week or more.

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My first digital camera

In August, 1996, I purchased my first digital camera, a Kodak DC20. This was, in fact, one of the very first (if not the first) “consumer” digital cameras. It was well within my price range at the time, which was indeed rather limited.

Unlike today’s digital cameras, this little gem did not have a built-in LCD display, high-speed USB transfer (USB had not been invented yet), a flash, or any of the other features we consider normal. Its resolution was measured in kilopixels, not megapixels, with a maximum photo size of 320×240 pixels. It connected with the computer via a serial cable terminated with what appeared to be a 1/8″ headphone plug. There was not an electronically-generated shutter sound; instead, there was a reassuring but mysteriously mechanical “thunk” when you pressed the shutter button. It would hold approximately 20 images, even at that low resolution.

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