Why Do I Take Photos?

Wants, Needs, And Desires Photography. Do you ever wonder what this world would be like without it? I couldn’t imagine living in a world without pictures – and let’s face it, we might as well include movies in this equation because they are just moving pictures anyway. Think about it. We’d never know what things look like in another country, let alone the next town unless we actually went there…

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About The Shot - ReeHeld

If you know me, follow me on social media, or you’ve listened to my podcast, you’d know I’ve been using ReeHeld a lot since it came out. In fact, I was an early beta tester for it, and it has quickly become my favourite app to shoot with when doing long exposures where water is involved. If you aren’t familiar with ReeHeld, it’s a simple app on the surface but quite complex in the way it works,…

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About The Shot - The Palisades

There’s a part of the Bruce Trail that runs through a wooded area along the Niagara Escarpment just within the city limits called The Palisades Loop, and I’ve never walked it. I really don’t know why. Clearly, I need to get off my lazy ass and explore my hometown more. I went to this spot with my wife and dog to check it out but our dog had a knee injury a while back so we cut the hike short. I…

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Posting Our Photos

My Experience With Social Media We’ve been sharing our digital images with others since the 1980s when email became a mainstream form of communication. In the 90s we saw blogging sites and the first photo sharing sites, Ofoto and Shutterfly, who were both launched in 1999. Since then, a great number of sharing platforms have come along, and some are still thriving while others have met their…

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Why I Shoot ProRAW — And This Won’t Be For Everyone

When I sold my DSLR camera and lenses in 2016 I made the decision to be an iPhoneographer. I’ve been shooting with an iPhone since then and haven’t looked back. That was seven years ago! Crazy isn’t it? Especially since I am what I’d consider to be a “technical” photographer. Sure, I think about composition, aesthetics, and, sometimes, even what story the photo could be telling, but if I’m being…

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Apple Camera vs The Others

Is A Third Party Camera App Better? I never could have taken this shot with the Apple Camera. This was taken with ReeXpose using the Telephoto Camera and I placed a Neutral Density filter over the camera. The iPhone comes with an awesome camera app, but is it enough? Well, I guess that depends on your needs. I’ve always believed that Apple does things with the 90-90 rule. They tend to please…

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Long Exposure On iPhone Explained

There are some terms used in iPhone photography that are, for the most part, relevant to photography in general, but some terms, when referring to the iPhone, are a little more nuanced. And quite often we just accept them as they are used because we know what is meant. Let’s start by looking at the term “iPhoneography”. It’s not hard to imagine that it means iPhone photography, and that’s…

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Filter Or No Filter

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About The Shot - A Little Waterfall

This is a shot that may never have been. Read more on my website.

Sometimes I stop at a place and have no intention of getting a photo of whatever might be at that location, and that lends itself to being completely unprepared if you do happen to see something worth capturing. It happens, no doubt, to all photographers at some point. The day I captured this image was no exception. We had just picked up our dog from the groomer and thought it would be nice to…

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Exploring ICM With iPhone

Exploring ICM With iPhone

Intentional Camera Movement, or ICM, with an iPhone can be achieved in a manner that is very similar to that of a traditional camera. It requires you to perform a long exposure which, when the camera is moved during the exposure, will have a blurred appearance that can be manipulated by the way you move the camera. For ICM work, I like to use a camera app called Reeflex, and if I want to shoot…

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48 MegaPixels

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Is The iPhone Camera a Real Camera?

Is The iPhone Camera a Real Camera?

Edited with Polarr Photo Editor There’s been an ongoing debate for years — and I can’t believe I’m still hearing it pop up once in a while — where some photographers or photography enthusiasts are saying that the iPhone camera isn’t a real camera. To some, this could be deemed “camera snobbery” and quite frankly, I don’t believe there is any room for it in the world. Our planet is messed up…

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About The Shot - Reeflex RAW

About The Shot – Reeflex RAW

This photo of a dock at the local boat launch is, well, really not that exciting, but as a test of how good Reeflex is at capturing a RAW photo, it’s very exciting to see the result. The photo was shot in ProRAW, which applies Local Tone Mapping (LTM), or the computational stuff that Apple adds to their image pipeline. That means SmartHDR, Deep Fusion and Noise Reduction were added to the DNG…

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Reeflex

Doing a podcast about iPhone photography lends itself to having a number of photography related apps on your iPhone, and I have no shortage of these types of apps. Editing apps, camera apps, social media apps… I simply have too many, but I feel it’s a necessity because I have to talk about them. Oh sure, there are many that I rarely use and I do have my favourites, but it’s nice to have a good…

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About The Shot - The Portrait

About The Shot – The Portrait

I have waited a long time to take this portrait. Over the years, I’ve seen portraits in black and white with what is called the Dragon Effect applied to them. This look was developed by Polish photographer and film maker, Andrzej Dragon. While it has also been done in colour images, I’ve wanted to do it for a black and white, and this is the first photo I’ve taken where it fits the image. The…

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About The Shot - Indian Falls Pano

About The Shot – Indian Falls Pano

In the fall of 2021, I accompanied some friends on a short hike to a local waterfall, Indian Falls. It was late in the season so the colourful foliage was all but finished showing off their wonderful hues of red, orange and gold, but there were enough leaves left on the trees to make it a worth while effort. I took plenty of photos during the hike in, and even shot some video as you can see…

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Panoramic

The iPhone has a great feature in the camera for shooting panoramas, and as the iPhone evolves with it’s powerful chipsets it creates highly detailed, dynamically exposed images that are just amazing. With each year that passes comes a new iPhone with a better chipset and a more powerful Image Signal Processor that allows us to take much better photos. I believe the Pano feature was introduced in…

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