Snapdragon Color Explosion

As always, thumbnails for a few of the submitted photos can be found below. You can view a larger version of each photo by clicking on its thumbnail. To view all of the photos submitted for the Scavenger Hunt assignment, click on the “View photos at SmugMug” link below the thumbnails. To get the full effect of these wonderful photos, I recommend viewing the SmugMug gallery as a slideshow by clicking on the Slideshow button at the upper right corner once you get to the SmugMug page.

Thanks to all of the participants for submitting these wonderful photos!

To recap, the topics for the assignment are as follows:

1. Lines
2. Orange
3. Water
4. Metal
5. Wood
6. Angles
7. Reflection
8. Soft
9. Sky
10. Two

You may choose any or all of the topics to photograph, but remember that you may submit only ONE PHOTO per topic. Please label each photo with the name of the topic to which it pertains. You can do full captions if you like, but the caption should include the name of the topic as listed above. Your Scavenger Hunt photos are due on Sunday, May 13. I’m really looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with!

Two

Water

Sky

Metal

Wood

Orange

Backyard Macro Practice - Honeysuckles

1. Lines
2. Orange
3. Water
4. Metal
5. Wood
6. Angles
7. Reflection
8. Soft
9. Sky
10. Two

You might want to write these topics down and carry the list with you when you’re out and about shooting photos. I think we’ll need a little extra time to complete this assignment, so I’ll give you until Sunday, May 13 to get your photos to me.

The rules for the assignment are quite simple:

1. Your photos have to be NEW, as in taken between now and Sunday evening, May 13 – NOT something you took last year, last week or even yesterday for that matter. New. Fresh. Now. No digging old photos out of your hard drive, ya hear? The idea is to take your camera out with the ten topics in mind and come up with the most interesting and creative shots that you possibly can.
2. You may choose any or all of the ten topics to photograph, but please submit only ONE photo of each of your chosen topics.

That’s it. If you’re in, start taking your photos now. Sometime between now and Sunday evening, May 13, email your photos to me at 39DegN@gmail.com and put “SCAVENGER HUNT” in the subject line. Please label each photo with the name of the topic above to which it pertains. You can do full captions, but the caption should include the name of the topic. The results of this assignment will be posted in the blog on Tuesday, May 15.

As always with these assignments, please keep in mind that you don’t need a fancy schmancy camera to play along. DSLR, point-and-shoot, camera phone… it doesn’t matter.These  photography assignments are just for fun and to help you become a better photographer by training your eye to see specific things or by practicing certain techniques. There’s no critique involved, no judges, no winners, no prizes… just really awesome photos with whatever camera you have available.

Got it? Let me know if you have questions about this assignment. If not, get out there and get busy! Remember… BE CREATIVE, use good composition techniques, and, most of all, HAVE FUN!

Here are a few examples from my archives:

Lines

Orange

Water

Metal

Wood

Angles

Reflection

Soft

Sky

Two

As always, thumbnails for a few of the submitted photos can be found below. You can view a larger version of each photo by clicking on its thumbnail. To view all of the photos submitted for the Color assignment, click on the “View photos at SmugMug” link below the thumbnails. To get the full effect of these wonderful photos, I recommend viewing the SmugMug gallery as a slideshow by clicking on the Slideshow button at the upper right corner once you get to the SmugMug page.

Thanks to my super awesome partipants for these wonderful images!

But then something changed. I got an iPhone 4S about a month and a half ago. I shall now leap to the defense of the truly-not-bad camera function that lurks within my beloved iPhone. Mind you, my iPhone camera will never, ever, EVER replace my Nikon DSLRs, but what a handy tool to have right there in my pocket pretty much ALL the time! I’d been contemplating getting a small pocket-size point-and-shoot camera for those times when I’d like to capture a moment but hauling the DSLR gear around isn’t practical or desirable. But now I don’t I need to! Yay!

Hey, this iPhone thing has an 8 megapixel camera! EIGHT!! My first “high end” point-and-shoot camera, purchased a mere 6 years ago, had only FIVE megapixels and it got me through an awful lot of travel photography with fairly good results. With 8 megapixels, you should be able to print up to 20×30-inch prints with pretty good quality. That’s not bad for an in-phone camera.

What makes the iPhone camera totally cool (and in some ways more FUN than a “regular” camera) is the apps. The phone comes with a basic Camera app, but you really need to download some other apps to take full advantage of the iPhone’s camera function. I’m not going to go into detail here since I’ve just begun to explore the world of iPhonography myself and since a lot of my readers might not have iPhones and don’t really care. However, if you DO have an iPhone, just go to the App Store, do a search for “Photography” and check out the myriad of photography apps at your fingertips. I fear I’ve gone a bit overboard in downloading “camera replacement” apps for my iPhone, however. (Let’s chalk it up to “research”). I currently have no fewer than eight of these apps on my iPhone and am busy experimenting with them all to determine which one(s) work best for me.

So… now I will show you some fun things I’ve done with the camera function of my iPhone + various apps. If I was a GOOD iPhoneographer (which I certainly do not claim to be), I would be able to tell you exactly what app I used for each photo and exactly what effects/filters/frames/etc. I applied, but, with the exception of the first photo below, I haven’t really kept track. I’ll try to do that for future iPhone photo posts.

I took the first image below with my iPhone at the Denver Zoo’s Tropical Discovery exhibit this past week. My iPhone came in mighty handy at this particular exhibit because, with its handy dandy little F2.4 lens, it actually handles low-light situations quite a bit better than my “real” cameras/lenses do. I then added an effect called More Wang and a frame called Freshman with the Camera Awesome app. I think this one turned out exceptionally awesome-ly.

The next one is my BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse veggie burger and fries with some sort of vintage/retro effect applied. These type of effects that make your photos look like you took them with your Kodak Instamatic back in the 70s are especially popular with Instagram and Hipstamatic users. I find it amusing that we’ve come SO far in digital photography that we can now make our photos look crappy on purpose.

The following photo of the most beautiful cat in the world has a texture of some sort applied, as well as a frame of some sort. Don’t ask me what, but… isn’t she beautiful????!!!!

I’m not sure exactly what I did to the photo below, but it turned out looking pretty cool:

And finally, the following distorted images, both from my “Paris” archive, were produced with a clever little app called Tiny Planets. You can take a new image or render an old image into the “tiny planet” format. I’m having a lot of fun with this one.

So… that is all I have to say about the wonderful world of “iPhoneography” at the moment. Look for future posts about other interesting iPhoneography-related info as well as new iPhoneography pics from time to time. If you don’t have an iPhone, feel free to ignore. But you should really get one.

(Please note that this blog post refers to iPhoneography, NOT iPadography. If you have an iPad, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t use it as a camera in public. You’ll just look SILLY).