All done with TiltShift Generator and Mill Colour, of course.

SCW, aka Sweet Cheeks Willie, posted a link to this video in a comment he left on my iPhone Photography article showing a “not yet released” iPhone camera app called “RetroCamera FREE”. This app looks pretty feature rich, but it’s hard to tell from the video what the quality will be of the photos once they’ve been processed. Plus the UI elements on some of the filter options look a little overwhelming to actually interact with and it’s hard to tell if you can fine tune any of these adjustments. But the app has yet to materialize, so I’ll reserve judgement until it actually shows up. It does continue to show off what the iPhone is capable of as a computing platform.

Oh and yeah, I recommend the mute button.

I’m unclear as to what a “handdrawn audioresponsive video exploration” is, but that’s not stopping me from fully enjoying this beautiful video by Gwen Vanhee.

Photographer and audio engineer John Carey has some beautiful desktop wallpapers on his site, FiftyFootShadows, as well as just some great photography in general. (via Minimal Mac)

Posh CSS is a site for “the latest and greatest techniques, tips and tutorials related to CSS”. Looks like a valuable resource for someone like myself who is a cripple when it comes to CSS or anything code-related for that matter. I came across it after hearing that Pat Dryburgh is now one of the site’s authors. Congrats Pat!

I’ve had my iPhone for a little over 2 months now and have been experimenting with its photographic capabilities. I love the instant availability the iPhone gives me to be able to snap a picture wherever I am and easily share it via various social channels such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. While the built in camera in the 3Gs is decent and the “touch to focus” functionality is a step closer to the control I’m used to with my digital SLR, the raw images from the iPhone camera ultimately leave a lot to be desired. Unless you’re in bright daylight and are usually a fair distance from your subject, your images end up looking flat.

Clearly one of the greatest strengths of the iPhone is it’s application environment and the thousands of developers busily working to get in on the action and on your phone. Many very talented developers have produced some amazing applications built to take the iPhone’s photographic capabilities to the next level by giving us tools to enhance our images. Some of the favorites are CameraBag, QuadCamera, Best Camera, Toy Camera, and TiltShift Generator. All of these apps are essentially post-processing tools that edit the photos hue, saturation, contrast, exposure (kind of), and maybe offer a couple of other specialized effects like vignetting and framing.

After trying these out and putting them through their paces, I found myself getting frustrated with the fact that these apps are similar enough to want to only use one, but different enough in the style of photos they produce that it’s hard to decide which one to use at any given time.

CameraBag for example gives you style presets such as Helga, Infrared, Fisheye, and Lolo, but with no option to fine tune those styles. Best Camera is from professional photographer Chase Jarvis and features custom, stylistic filters that you can add to an image and then rearrange their order for a little more creative control. That level of customization is really nice and the results generally look good, but again the filters are essentially “hard coded” and lack individual editing control. Best Camera does have amazing social integration with the ability to publish your images to Facebook, Twitter, and to The Best Camera community.

After more experimentation and an inspirational tweet by Kory Westerhold, I came across the magical combination of using TiltShift Generator and Mill Colour. TiltShift Generator is an app that at it’s core gives you tools to simulate the look of tilt-shift photography, but as you experiment with the controls you can easily move beyond the typical “miniature” look that’s synonymous with a tilt-shift lens. What I love about this app is that it helps simulate a stronger depth-of-field than the native “touch to focus” feature gives you and you can also get creative in where that focal point exists. From there the app provides color editing for saturation, brightness, and contrast which, regardless of being only 3 sliders, can dramatically alter the look of your photo. Lastly you have a slider for adding a vignette and then the option to save your photo to the photo library or export (I presume to twitter, but I’ve never used it).

At this point I move the photo over to Mill Colour, which I’m convinced is one of the best image/photo apps available on the iPhone. Plus, it’s free. Mill Colour is a color grading application built by the ridiculously talented people at The Mill. I usually start with one of the color presets and then adjust the saturation, lift, gamma, and gain from there. These kinds of tools are what professional color graders use in the entertainment industry. Granted, I’m not saying this app and an app like Autodesk Lustre or Apple’s Color are equal, but, in principal, you’re doing the same thing to an image. You’re creating mood.

This image above was done using the TiltShift Generator and Mill Colour combination, but with one additional step of adding a white border using Adobe’s recently released Photoshop Mobile for the iPhone. It’s an interesting app, but I really only use it to crop or add a border like this to my images.

Here are a few more images that I’ve created using this app combination:

The iPhone photography landscape is still coming into focus and these apps are young, but the future looks promising. I do have a couple of wishes such as the ability to save my own presets in Mill Colour and being able to automate my progression through these individual apps would be nice. This last wish I know is a platform issue and not something I see Apple doing anytime soon, but the idea of me being able to string together apps much like I create actions in Photoshop would save me the time it takes to open and close each app. Plus these “application workflows” (for lack of a better term) could be shareable with other iPhone users and promote apps that a user might not own but be enticed to purchase. The more the iPhone becomes a productivity device the more the idea of using multiple apps to accomplish a single goal will become a reality.

Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.

Yep. (via Minimal Mac).

This is a great video of Jónsi & Alex talking about how they recorded their album “Riceboy Sleeps“, which is easily one of the top albums I’ve heard all year. The song that comes in around the 5:37 mark, “Boy 1904″, is such a beautiful track from the album.

I’ve been researching a lot of different options. I like the idea of a Firewire drive for speed and the fact that you can daisy-chain FW drives together. I also looking into a NAS solution after a friend of mine rigged up his own version of a Time Capsule for at least half the cost. I’m currently at a loss for which way to go.

In an ideal world I’d get something like a Drobo and use that for both backups and media storage and have the benefits of redundancy and expandable storage, but that’s way outside my budget. The NAS solution is nice because of the wireless setup, but I still only have one drive with that and wouldn’t have a backup of the media stored on that drive. The external FW drives look to be an interesting option because of the connection speed and the fact that I can connect two drives together. The downside is that it’s another wire running into my laptop and the FW drives I’ve been looking at are portable drives which I’ve heard can be less reliable.

I’ve also looking into online backup solutions like Backblaze and Carbonite. While the remote storage idea is very appealing, I’m not really interested in getting into another monthly payment situation.

So I’m petitioning you all for help. Do you have a similar setup or know of a solution that I should consider? Are there drives you guys recommend or brands to stay away from? I know a lot of this is subjective, but any additional ideas or direction would be of help to me at this point.

Photographer Rusty Ralston recently completed this 30 day photo essay of Brooklyn.