I have another blog. Because I don’t have enough places to post material already. Well, that’s not quite true. I now have a tumblr blog, but it’s about trying to get focus. I want one place to put my mobile shots. They were getting spread out. Hipstamatic, Instamatic, BestCam, twitter, google+, or stuck on my phone. They will now go here.

Part two of the reasoning is the inspiration from Sabrina Henry and her new mini-me photo blog. I am going to make another renewed effort to look for and take photographs daily. We get so busy, it’s easy to forget to shoot. More importantly, for me anyway, I forget to look. Training yourself to look, and see things that others pass by is part of the challenge and the fun of photography. I need to keep at it. The new tumblr blog is part of that effort.

The first thing you need to do is purchase an ebook. The site as it is currently is quite navigable by a mobile device. It isn’t optimized for mobile, but with a little pinching and moving around it is possible to follow the checkout process through e-junkie and PayPal and buy an ebook. This part of our exercise you could do from another computer somewhere if you have access. Just erase cookies when you are done if it’s a public machine.

Once you have made your purchase, you will get an email from Craft and Vision. Check for it on your mobile device email client. Click the e-junkie link.

This takes you to a page on fat free cart’s site. This is where the PDF is stored, and the link on this page contains the unique code that allows you to download the PDF. Now don’t worry. You get s very generous 9 attempts, so you can re-download at home if you want.

Press and hold for a second the “Click Here” link. This will bring up an option to copy the link. Press that button. Safari won’t let you save the PDF if you were to just open it. We need another program.

My favorite PDF tool is GoodReader. Navigate back to the main screen shown here if you had a doc open. There is an option for “Web Downloads”. Press that.

In the next screen press the “Enter URL” link.

In the screen that pops up, tap and hold a second to get the iOS popup that let’s you paste in the URL you copied.

GoodReader will download it to your device and you can read it right away! Enjoy your PDF’s on your iOS device without your computer.

PS. This post’s images were taken on an iPhone4. Parts blurred using filterstorm, and uploaded and the post started using the wordpress app. I finished it by moving the images into place in the regular wordpress interface.

I’ve been snapping away with my iPhone lately. The app I have been using the most is Hipstamatic. I started with a few issues that bugged me, so I wanted to tell you how I set it up. This is not how everyone needs to set their camera up, just what works for me.

Resolution: this was disappointing. I shot a ton of images that I was going to put in a small book. They were all at the default resolution of 600px. Nuts. Too small to print. It took a long time to figure out that you set the resolution via a sliding switch on the side of the lens. You need to turn the camera around and slide the lever to the left of the lens up. You now have full resolution.

Push the lever on the left up

Composition: this drove me nuts. Some people might like the retro like aspect of not knowing exactly what picture they are taking, but not me. I like to compose carefully. To fix this, you need to be in the Settings app, Hipstamatic section. Here change the Viewfinder Mode from Classic to Precision Framing.

Hipstamatic setting page on the Settings App

Random changing film and lens: Again, maybe I am just not the target retro user of this app, but I don’t want the camera to randomly switch things on me when I shake the phone whether it’s accidental or deliberate. There are two ways to fix this. If you edit your lenses you can pick which lens you want it to pick on shake. Me, I use the sledgehammer approach and turned Shake to Randomize off completely in the settings app.

Set shake to change individually

Metadata: if you want tags and GPS info to make it to your photo sharing sites, you also need to make sure that this is enabled in the settings app. I think this is on by default. You can also set this each time you post. The biggest issue I had to getting this to work on flickr was that I had blocked this feature on the flickr account settings. Go figure.

Now, the reason I started and continue to shoot with this app is one lens and film combo. I saw Josh Bradley using this when he took the portrait that I am using in twitter and Facebook. I downloaded them right away. I use the BlacKeys Ultrachrome B+W film and the Lucifer VI lens. You can get them both in the Portland Hipstapak. It will cost you a couple of dollars via in app purchase. Its the only combo I am using. I know I should be more adventurous.

Anyway, this app is all about fun, so have fun taking pictures.

The first picture is a couple of bags worth of me doing my part to destroy the planet. I use my small flashes a lot, and go through batteries like crazy. I can’t tell you how long that is from, but with 3 flashes, one change of batteries equals 24 batteries. I don’t use all three each shoot, but sometimes I do, and I always want to get to a shoot with fresh ones ready to go.

The second picture is what spending $200 on batteries and a charger get you. You read that right, the 8 battery charger that can charge in as little as one hour cost almost $100, and luckily came with 8 batteries. I then purchased 4 more sets of 4 batteries, which at $20 each, throw in some shipping, and voila, $200.

Why did I pick these ones? Drew Gurian. He is an assistant to Joe McNally (and a great photographer himself), and when I was a DLWS workshop, Drew was showing us his gear. I figured, if these batteries are good enough for Joe, then they have to be good enough for me!

PS. The noisy pics were taken with my iPhone, and not really enough light.

The main reason that I got an iPad was to present photographs to people. I wanted to use it as an electronic portfolio. That by it’s self would be a pretty good use, but it has come to be so much more useful.

I had photographed a gymnastics event for the Richfield Gymnastics Club, and had taken stills and some video that I put into 7 videos of the event, from rehearsal to warm-ups to the actual event. The videos were put together into a DVD that the club will sell. I could have put the DVD into a computer, and pulled that out, set it on a table, and had people lean over to try to see the screen. Instead, I handed them an iPad with the videos on it and let them hold the device. It makes a world of difference. As the two people I had brought the iPad to show watched the videos, other came and looked over their shoulders. I really think the iPad was more effective than a laptop would be.

I was taking pictures at a wedding this last weekend, and I was not the official photographer, so I had some time in between the ceremony and the reception. I went home, did a quick Lightroom edit, hard drive export, iPad sync, and I was off to the reception. When I got there, I started passing the iPad around. People were flipping out. They loved being able to see pictures of an event they had just attended. Even better, some people hadn’t been able to attend the ceremony, but were at the reception, and were able to see what had just happened.

Later in the evening, after taking some reception and dance shots, I downloaded images from my memory card to the iPad with the camera connection kit, and then made the rounds again. The challenge will be to do the same thing at a wedding where I am the official photographer, and I don’t know most of the people there. I think it is worth giving it a shot though. It was so well received.

I also have images and video at the ready to pull out and show people as a portfolio. I have done this several times where I wouldn’t of likely had a book with me. Instead of just handing out a card and saying check out my website, I can show them the images I have on my site right there.

There are lots of apps that photographers can use that are not just for photographers. I have created blog posts while on the move, checked out Twitter, my RSS feeds, and verified some content from my website. I have even used the iPad via an app called iSSH to get a command prompt at my web service provider and correct some html on my site. Yes you can do these things on a net book, but you can’t do the portfolio things as well.

If I can get it out of the hands of my family, I take where ever I go.

Anyway, I have put together my own clamp like this with parts from Adorama.

The above clamp is what it looks like put together. There are three parts that you need.

• Flashpoint Clamp with 1/4-20 Stud ($9.95)
• Giottos MH1004 Mini Ball Head ($12.95)
• Stroboframe Universal Shoe Mount ($9.75)

So, for $32.65 you get pretty much the same thing, but you get pieces that you can reuse for other purposes if needed. Also, this shoe mount will fit any flash, including the SB900.

Ok, why do I call this the Jeffery Clamp? Well, I order stuff through Jeff Snyder at Adorama, so that’s the name I gave it. Give him a shout if you need help ordering stuff from Adorama. (jsnyder@adorama.com)

So, what do I use it for? Well, it can be clamped onto anything, which makes is quite versatile, but here is one thing I used it for recently.

Look at the upper right of this image. See the light there? It is an SB900 on my Jeffery Clamp, connected to the background stand. No need for another pole. I used this like a hair light, or a side light depending on where I aimed the light. Here is a picture where the light was added to bring more light to the right side of her hair.

So, what does the Camera Connection Kit come with for $29.95? A SD(HC) card reader (left), and a USB adapter (right) that plug into the iPad. Seems a little high for what you really get, but hey, it’s the only option right now.

I tried both connections, and they both worked when done as intended. You can take images off your cards, and you can connect your camera via USB cable. However, you can’t connect a hard drive, and I couldn’t find a way to put images from the iPad onto a card. It appears to be a one way deal. iPad as a data consumer again.

When you connect a card or camera, you get the photo’s screen with a camera tab. The screen quickly fills up with dashed outlines for the images on your camera (or card) and then starts to fill in thumbnails.

There are now buttons at the top for “Delete All” and “Import All”. Once the image thumbnails are there, you can choose which images you want to upload to the iPad.

By clicking on a thumbnail, you can select individual images to import. You can flick up and down with your finger to scroll through all the images. These thumbnails are from my daughters field trip to a nature center this week.

Notice the buttons at the top changed from “Delete All” to “Delete Selected”, and “Import All” to “Import”.

Pressing the import button brings up a little drop down where they give you the option of importing all again. Not sure why this is necessary.

The screen shot above seems weird to me. This is where I ended up after doing my selective import. I guess we are here because there are sill possible images to upload, but with items still having that green check box, it is hard to tell if they are selected or imported all ready.

I pressed the Albums tab to get to the screen above. Notice that I now have a “Saved Photos” album with the screen shots I took, a “Last Import” album with the images I just imported, and a “All Imported” album that would have everything I had imported and not erased off the iPad.

What is think is cool about this, is that the images are NEF files. They are Nikon RAW image files, and they show up on the iPad. What I don’t know, is what you edit when you use a program like Photogene. Are you using a built in preview contained in the RAW image, or is the iPad converting. I am leaning to the preview, but it seems to be full size, which surprised me.

You can then get the images off the iPad as if it were a regular camera. Just connect your iPad to your computer via the sync cable. These images won’t transfer via iTunes, you need to import them. I tried Lightroom, iPhoto, and Image Capture on my Mac. The RAW files come off just fine, as if they were transferred directly from your card. One interesting thing I found, was that I couldn’t transfer the screen shots using Lightroom, but they showed up in iPhoto when I tried that. Strange.

So, the question going around seems to be whether this can replace field back up units like ones made by Epson and others. I am not so sure. The screen is big and gorgeous, but it is also big. I think the smaller units while having a smaller screen are more rugged and compact, but I don’t own or use one, so I can’t really comment. What I think would be ideal would be an iPod Touch or iPhone that you could connect this to AND a laptop hard drive or other SSD drive to make a backup to. That would be much smaller and eliminate the need for a laptop in many travel situations. But that is just wishing smoke.

Anyway, it looks like a fun accessory to play with, and I will experiment with using it as a backup device when traveling.

I took this picture, from my iPod, of an iPad showing off my portfolio. It looks amazing. The images are actually sized perfectly for this device. But there was something weird. All the images in the night album, and the occasional other image won’t show. I get the blue image not found icon. Very weird. I wonder if they are exported with some weird settings. Not sure how that happened.

I was also able to confuse the javascript by pressing on the album and next/previous buttons. I will have to take a look at that. As noted yesterday, it doesn’t work well on the iPhone either. I also checked Kelby’s site again, and it looks great too, just not on the iPhone. I am wondering how that device reports it’s screen size. I might just need to look for that browser and then display presized smaller images.

If you want to get a rough idea of what your site would look like on the iPhone, check out iPad Peek. It doesn’t show the broken images like the iPad did, but it will give you a sense of size and how your content will fit. Just enter your site in the address bar at the top.

Are you a photographer with a flash site? Do you know that the iPad, just like the iPhone, will not display flash content? What’s a photographer to do? Scott Kelby looked at this earlier today.

When Kelby first put up his flash portfolio, I decided to create a javascript only portfolio site to do the same thing. See my portfolio here, and my post here.

I think my code is successful, to a certain extent. It works great on the desktop, but doesn’t work as well on the iPhone, and I don’t yet know on the iPad. Need to try that out. Anyone that wants to comment about that, please do.

I think that my issue on the iPhone is the size of the images. I think they need to be smaller to save on bandwidth, and prevent the phone’s browser from having to scale the images so much. That may be the issue on Kelby’s site too, because his new non flash site didn’t work well on the iPhone either. His new portfolio is also a jQuery javascript site done by RC. It was too slow to be useable on my phone. I wonder if image size is the issue there to. Now his site was optimized for the iPad, not the iPhone, but I want mine to work on both. I will need to do some more testing with smaller images to see.