“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…” ― John Donne, No man is an island – A selection from the prose
n whatever activities we choose to pursue we often reach out to others, or to sources of information recorded/created by others, to facilitate our understanding, our journey, our advancement, and even our enjoyment of our venture. On the topic of photography, I’ve read any number of books both technical and inspirational written by other photographers and I daily read Internet articles on the subject or study the photographs of others. The amount of data available today is overwhelming and often the difficulty lies in selecting the most relevant and that which best suits our own needs.
Technology also plays a huge role. everyone I know has a smartphone of some sort they carry with them. These mobile computers bring function and information to our fingertips in all but the most remote areas. The majority of my own smartphone (in my case an iPhone) usage consists of communications (as a phone or text messaging,) looking up information on the Internet and accessing a map app for locations and directions.
here are also a few apps I use on occasion which translate directly to photography, in addition to and beyond directly taking photos with my phone. In an effort to be “a part of the main” I’ve listed these apps below broken down under functional categories.
Disclaimer, most of these applications I’ve used for a considerable period of time and there may well be better, more capable application out there now that perform the same functions. I’m not trying to say that these apps are absolutely “the best” ones but these have been useful and dependable enough to become my goto’s. If I remember correctly many of these are purchased apps but they are fairly inexpensive and some of these apps have an Android versions available.
Planning and Utilities
The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) : This app falls into the category of a photo planning tool and it can be a great help in planning outdoor photography with natural light. It features a map-centric Sun, Moon and Milky Way calculator that can help you determine how the light will fall at certain times for any location on earth. It has some pretty amazing capabilities of which I only use a small portion of. I use it to determine where the best location would be for according to the suns position on the horizon in sunrise or sunset sessions or where I might expect the shadows to fall during daytime photography. The app can be purchased either alone or as a bundle of related apps.
GeoTag Photos Pro 2 (watch/phone/tablet/computer) : This is a simple app which can be used to add the geo position coordinates to your photos in batch mode after a days travel or shooting. I enjoy having the geolocation of each photo recorded and this is a simple useful way to accomplish this. The phone or watch app is a simple geo-position logging application which can be set to record positions at a user-defined frequency. Then after a photography session, it will match the photo’s date-time stamp with its log of geo-positions adding the nearest geo-position to the photo’s metadata. Two critical points, you must, of course, carry your phone/watch with you at all times (which I always do) and the phone/watch date/time must match the camera’s internal time (I’ve forgotten to check a couple of times.) Also of note, with more frequent the geo-position recording battery usage on the phone will be a bit faster so if you’re shooting in one general area you may only require infrequent logging as opposed to frequently logging if you’re constantly moving across longer distance.
PhotoSync – transfer photos : I have a phone, tablet and laptop computer and this app, running on each, provides a method for me to transfer photos wirelessly, reliably and fairly effortlessly between all when they are connected to the same wireless network…like at home.
PeakFinder AR : If you photograph at the beach or in the Great Plains this app will be of no use to you but if you live near mountains or travel to a mountainous region and have found yourself questioning which distant peak is the one you’re looking at, this app may be the answer to your question. Using your phone’s capabilities to pinpoint where it is and which direction it’s facing the app can calculate what peaks are in that direction which you’re looking at and provide the names of each peak on a representative or phone camera view.
Photo Editing Apps
SnapSeed : There seem to be hundreds of photo editing/filter Apps available for iOS but to be honest I edit very few photos on my phone or tablet, usually only if I’ll be publishing them to the web directly from the device. Even then I do minimum editing. But when I do, SnapSeed is one of the ones that I often find myself using. It opens both RAW and jpeg files and has 29 Tools and Filters, including Healing, Brush, Structure, HDR, and Perspective.
Adobe Photoshop Express : More recently I’ve also been experimenting with this app from Adobe which has many features for adjusting and stylizing photos. For my use, it’s perhaps a bit of overkill.
Camera Replacement Apps
Camera+ 2 : The iPhone and iPad come with capable if not a basic Apple Camera App in iOS and it’s the one I’ve used most often. However, I’ve also recently used and like some of the additional features in this Camera+ 2 App. It not only functions to make the photo but also has many preset and filters to explore your creative flair.
ProCam 6 : Another very capable iOS camera replacement that I’ve experimented/played with.
As stated above I honestly use these apps infrequently but have found them to be useful enough to keep on my phone. Do you have your own favorite photographic apps you’d like to share?
I do like Snapseed. It is one of my go-to editors also. I also like the hyperfocal charts built into PhotoPills, and it has some overlapping features with TPE, but I like them both.
Thanks for the mention of PhotoPills, Mark, I’ll take a look at it. When I had a full-frame D700 I was all about DOF and the hyperfocal distance but since switching to a micro 4/3’s Olympus, where it takes some effort to get shallow DOF effects, I guess I’ve become a bit lazy in that regard. :-) I do miss being able to so readily have shallow DOF for effect even if sometimes it worked against me. Take care.
It is worth checking out. It does have a lot more features than hyperfocal – which I think should be of some use to maximize DOF for four thirds also. The UI doesn’t very fancy – more of a focus on function and information.
Those sound interesting. I use Snapseed from time to time and I like it quite a bit. Another app that I really like, when I just feel like playing around with filters, “films”, “lenses”, etc, is Hipstamatic. Probably my favorite toy, as far as camera apps go. I have seen TPE, but if I remember correctly, it was $10, or so. It “seems” expensive for an app, but, when I think about it, it’s much cheaper than a desktop app and what it offers is pretty incredible. I’ve not tried it, but it sure seems worthwhile.
I like the idea of the GeoTag photo app; however, I frequently forget to change my camera’s clock to for DST – frequently = never! :D
Paul, you might want to check out the App that Mark mentioned, PhotoPills. It’s got many of the same functions as TPE and perhaps even a few more. The GeoTag photo app does allow you to apply an offset time in case you do forget to sync the camera time…which I’ve done on occasion. :-)