The Glif

iPhone

A QR tripod mount for the iPhone 4/4S

Steve Jobs was right. ‘Simple is hard’, he said, when talking of sweating the details of a design. And, sadly, most of the accessory makers for the iPhone have tried for quick bucks and refused to sweat the details. ‘Think Different’, whatever the grammatical shortfallings of that mantra, is one foreign to their thinking, or lack thereof.

And so it is with tripod mounts. The plenitude of offerings out there is underwhelming to say the least. Most take the guise of snap-on backs or ugly straps which go across the face of the iPhone. But one, brought to us by the same funding mechanism which saw the outstanding success of the Luna-Tik iPod watch band, Kickstarter, really does Think Different.

The makers of the Glif had a similar success in raising capital for the funding of the injection molding process required to manufacture the device, though as I had decided to pass on the flawed iPhone 4 I had no interest in it. Now that the identically sized and shaped iPhone 4S is here with none of the antenna issues of the iPhone 4, I bought a Glif from Amazon and tried it out.

Suffice it to say that this is the iPhone tripod mount for thinking people. Small, light, take-anywhere and superbly functional, you can see it in use below.

The Glif can also function as an iPhone support, so check their site if eyestrain is your thing.

The Glif holds the iPhone securely and shaking it as hard as I could I was unable to make it part company with the iPhone. A GorillaPod would make a perfect mobile tripod accessory for the Glif. Until now I have resisted buying one as it just seems too flimsy for even a small DSLR. But given the iPhone’s low weight, the GorillaPod will likely be finding a home here soon.

For taking movies just start the movie from the iPhone. For still shots, as there is no remote release available for the iPhone making the likelihood of camera shake higher, blow $0.99 on the Camera+ iPhone app which includes a nice self timer. Touch the self timer screen and it switches between 5, 15 and 30 seconds.

Bertie poses for Camera+ with its self timer.

More importantly, if you are into the whole ‘lone figure in the landscape’ thing, the self timer is just what the doctor ordered when you have to be the model.

If you use a screen protector or a case or some other encumbrance on your iPhone, forget it. The Glif is not for you.

iPhone 5 update: When Apple came out with its toy-like iPhone 5, a device whose flimsy feel and compromised assembly (uneven seams in mine) does not remotely live up to that of the 4/4S, it also made the phone thinner, rendering the above Glif useless. There’s now a slimmer model available for the iPhone 5 and it works just as well.

William Albert Allard

Book reviews

Book review.

Click the picture to go to Amazon US where you will also find a video presentation by Allard.

Photographers like National Geographic’s William Albert Allard and Sam Abell pretty much put the nail in the coffin of tired and increasingly pretentious hack monochrome work. We live in a world of color and refusing to see it thus mostly testifies to the skill of the photographer, or lack thereof. Sure, every now and then something works better in black and white but mostly that’s for the artsy-fartsy set or for collectors of vintage images. Yes, HC-B is better without color, but he is in a class of one.

This is a magnificent book. The color photographs, their reproduction, Allard’s text – the whole thing is as good as it gets. Allard never pulls punches but that does not make his work in any way crude. Some of the slaughterhouse pictures will offend tender sensibilities.This is a great color photojournalist at work.

Highly recommended for anyone wanting to broaden his vision.

Allard writes:

“I think I can feel color … I can’t explain it, but I can feel it. In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color”. Bravo!

My favorite? ‘Outside my window’ taken in, where else? Paris, Le Marais on page 153. The cover picture of the Sicilian beauty Benedetta Buccellato, above, is interestingly not especially representative of his work, so don’t expect a book of fashion pictures. However, I can only agree with his friend’s comment on seeing the actress’s portrait gracing the cover of National Geographic: “A beautiful woman on one cover is worth ten months of monkeys”. You can keep the monkeys and you won’t find any in this book. The work here is that of a color street snapper par excellence.

Background Blur

Technique

Making the subject pop.

I have referred to the need to blur backgrounds in pictures made with short focal length lenses often. As cameras get smaller, focal lengths shorten. The 35mm FFE lens in the iPhone 4S, for example, has a focal length of but 4.3mm, meaning just about everything is always sharp. At a given aperture, depth of field is solely a function of focal length, having nothing to do with sensor size.

To put this in perspective, the 50mm FFE lens on a full frame 35mm camera or DSLR become 150mm on a 4″ x 5″ sheet film monster, 80mm on a 6×6 medium format Hasselblad, 25mm on an MFT body and just 6 mm on the typical cell phone with its microscopic sensor. Compared to a 6mm, the depth of field of a 150mm lens is miniscule – everything is in focus with the former, little is with the latter. So selective focus on small cameras, absent help from software, is not going to happen ‘in camera’, yet.

If a picture is worth a thousand words an instructional video is an order of magnitude more efficient, so I have made a brief video explaining how to confer background blur using Photoshop CS5, which you can see by clicking the image below. While I start and end the process in Lightroom3, that’s not a required part of the workflow. Use whatever database you like for storage.

And remember, the only people who will know you used this technique will be those you tell in advance.

Click to view the 8 minute video.

One day this technology will be built into software in cameras. The user will be able to restrict the zone of sharpness to the main subject. Cameras already have face recognition. Selective focus is a rational extension of this thinking. Meanwhile, PS CS5 does just fine.

The iPhone 4S does San Francisco

iPhone, Photographs

How good a street snapper is it?

Test charts never did cut it for this street snapper. Real world use and responsiveness turn my crank. So, with that view in mind, I ventured to SF from the south bay, the iPhone 4S’s hotspot providing wifi for the iPad so that I could do my day job on the train there and back.

The iPhone is not going to win any prizes for ergonomics and, frustratingly, I found myself activating the movie slider on more than one occasion until I got the hang of how to hold the gadget right, neither going into movie mode or obscuring the lens. I learned to hold it in the left hand just so, with the camera on, and it was then easy to raise to face level, squint and shoot. I used the Volume ‘+’ button for the shutter release, in preference to the awful touch button on the screen which is an ergonomic nightmare.

What made the whole experience a (relative) joy is the responsiveness of the shutter release which has minimum delay and short time between snaps. Just for fun I tried to see how fast I could shoot and managed 24 snaps in 15 seconds, without trying too hard. Not half bad! Those were all garbage of course, as is typical for machine gun shooting. But one or two others worked out, helped by the strange unobtrusiveness of the iPhone, as your subjects think you are messing with a phone rather than taking their picture. In many respects, now that it has a half-decent camera, the iPhone 4S is the least obtrusive street snapper I have used. As a matter of interest, I consistently found portrait orientation easier than landscape.

Where you see blurred backgrounds they are courtesy of Photoshop CS5 and those thinking of writing me about bokeh or some such nonsense should spare themselves the effort. Bottom line, post processing blur works and it works superbly. It’s hard to relate with a straight face but there are dorks out there who get off on studying the unsharp bits ….

Confused. Obviously an Android user. On Maiden Lane.

Yerba Buena Moscone Center carousel.

Union Square. This lady bears a striking resemblance to Georgia O’Keefe.

Ad doubtless sponsored by knee and back surgeons.

Yuerba Buena colors.

Alone.

Machismo. A lovely warm, masculine face.

Carousel horse.

Chez Mondrian. Off Brannan Street.

The iPhone has got what it takes for street snaps and not too many excuses are called for.

Some of the above were processed lightly in LR3 with background blur added in PS CS5.

Lunch after all this exertion? Why at the South Park Cafe of course!

Pork, dates, a rich sauce and mash. iPad testifies that this was a deductible business trip! Mmmm!

Fellow diners.

Bill Atkinson

Book reviews, Photographers

Book review.

Click to order.

As you are reading this on a computer you are a user of Bill Atkinson’s work, whether you know it or not. You see, Bill was the designer of the original Macintosh graphical user interface almost three decades ago, building on the work done by Xerox at PARC (who were clueless as to what they had) and it’s one used by every Mac and PC today.

But chance does not distribute talent evenly, so in addition to being one of the greatest software engineers of our time, Bill can also lay claim to being an immensely talented photographer.

‘Within the Stone’ is a picture book of 72 photographs of naturally occurring stones. That’s the prosaic description. The reality is that this is simply gorgeous abstract photography, conveyed through the best color reproduction in any book I have seen. It’s not enough that Bill researched his subject over many years and migrated from medium format film to a large sensor scanning digital back to make his pictures. In the process he got deeply involved in researching the reproduction of color on paper and to say that the result is a revelation simply fails to do it justice.

Until now the touchstone for me of abstract photography of naturally ocurring colors and shapes has been Roy Hamman‘s superb Boatscapes, pictures of weathered boat hulls, four of which I am proud to say hang on the dining room wall here. Well, Roy finally has some competition!

If you buy the book, please buy it from Bill directly, not from Amazon. This is a labor of love and I would bet it’s a big money loser for the photographer. Support the arts for just a few dollars more than the WalMart of online sales demands. And, as you might expect of the designer of the Mac’s elegant interface, the packaging is perfect too, with the cardboard shipping container’s flaps overlapping just so, preventing a careless knife from damaging the contents. But then you probably would expect no less from Bill Atkinson, a man not given to doing things by halves.