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Mobile Photography Overview Part 1

welcome. And thanks for having me back again. And for our second to the last class out of this 10 part series on creative photography again, just a overview of that is my concept when I pitched this to Creativelive was that there are a lot of different ways of seeing, um, and with that comes different ways of shooting. And for me specifically, I am a bit of a mad scientist in the laboratory. Experimenting and playing, I think, is one of the best ways how to learn. But I found myself in all these little teeny, different, um, backwaters of photography, like infrared photography or motion blur photography or underwater photography. Or now things like aerial photography Or, in this case, our subject for today mobile photography, or I pornography. And each one of these little areas components of photography has a different way of seeing. That's kind of what attracted me. I wasn't so enamored with just getting the world's best landscape or the world's best portrait. I liked experimenting wit...

h how these captures how these stories could be created within the camera and also within post, because that really was my background. Been teaching the photo shop and light room and all things related to digital imagery for the last years or so My I am a and M f a r in digital imagery. But it was really this idea of using a camera to see differently. And that is where things like infrared photography being able to see things that the human eye can't normally see. Um, underwater photography. We normally or not, you know, taking pictures of the underwater world motion blur. We don't We can't see something at a slow shutter speed. We can't free something with our eye at a thousands of a second when it comes to this area of mobile photography. And we have toe admit that the IPhone is kind of dominated this for the last umpteen years. So we we've been tending to call it I've pornography is the revolution is not only in the fact that we have a camera with us 24 Just keep one of these here. Um, but we've also added this a wonderful laboratory of the psychotic genius programmers who have created this entire app world that has actually changed how we think of photography and for a lot of people. It's the first time that they've gotten back into photography since they were maybe a kid. So for a huge number of people, this is the first time they've got excited about it, not only because they've got a really nice camera in their pocket, but they get to play with it. To get to experiment, they get toe, mush it around and get back to their box of crayons, which really was one of the the motivating factors again for the Syriza's. Can I have my box of crayons back? You know where we got that beat out of us when we were a kid? And we've been grown ups, you know, doing important stuff for her lives. And now we get to play again. Most of you watching. And I know all of you here are addicted to photography or professional photographers. And so that's, you know, preaching to the choir, the excitement about photography. But for a lot of people, it's it's really is coming back into, ah, creative side of them that they've lost. I think that's one of the reasons why people are so giddy about mobile photography is it really gives them a chance to play for professional photographers and people who are used to shooting with their big boy or big girl camera. This, by the way, was what we were shooting with yesterday. Yesterday was our macro class and thes air extender tubes that takes my walk around lands my 18 to Nikon and which has about a foot focusing approximately how close you can get to it. Putting on these rings these cheaper little rings for eBay from 10 bucks. And I can actually press something against the glass and actually take a picture. Incredible macro practices were playing with yesterday, but anyway, so we all have been excited with our big boy and big girl cameras for probably our whole life. But even for those of us who have that equipment all of a sudden, we we get this little ridiculous thing in our hand and we become a kid again because we get to experiment, play. You can't take yourself too seriously when you're pulling out your phone to take a picture, right? And just that freedom to go, nobody's gonna die. You know, I get to shoot my head off playing. Nobody's gonna you know, Judge me or critique me, and I then have these also thes APS that I could do stuff. I mean, there's a lot of photographers who would never do the exaggerated HDR antique ing and grinned defying and all the stuff that's being done. But all of a sudden you get a phone, and now we have permission. It's like, Yeah, okay, nobody's watching home alone in bed. I'm not watching TV. I'm just gonna tweak right if you're watching re out. By the way, if you're at home watching bad TV and doing reality TV shows as opposed to tweaking, tweak, and they're a lot better things to do in life than watching TV and this is one of them. So that's one reason why I absolutely love this area photography, because it gives you that permission to play. You combine that with these abs that not only are letting you do these funky, grungy kind of things, but some of them, because of that has an example in the new this the IPhone six. The eight chip in here ridiculously fast supercomputer inside of this device allows you to do things that you can't even do on your big boy Big girl camera as an example, we're gonna be looking at panoramas and stuff, and there's no way. If you've ever tried to do a vertical panel with your SLR and then stitch it in photo shop, you know it's ridiculously challenging to be able to do something like that and all of a sudden, because this has got a built in gyroscope as well as an incredibly fast processor so it can shoot incredibly quickly. Now, all of a sudden we can shoot a vertical Pano even is something that has small, thin wires on it and have it match perfectly. And up to now, with this camera, 43 megapixels is what you can shoot with this little bloody phone when shooting in the panel mode. So it's amazing what you can do because of the technology built into the camera itself. And again, people like Apple go Well, there's only so much we can do with the camera that's the size of your pinky fingernail, but we do have a supercomputer. So you combine these actually, some really nice optics in there with, um, the, uh, the computing prowess of a supercomputer and actually you have some amazing capabilities. So that's what we're gonna be touching on today with that little brief intro. Why don't we introduce ourselves for our We've got our same class we've had for the last few days. But I think a lot of people will be joining us just for this class because of its unique subject matter. When we start and name the sort of photography that turns you on so to speak that you do and a specific interest related to mobile photography. And, um, I enjoy a lot of different kinds of photography. Have been experimenting a lot with a lot of different things. Um, I enjoy outdoor photography in particular macro. And I find with the mobile phones, it's often the best camera I have is the one that I have with me at that moment, I'd like to be able to do more with that. Okay. Great. One of Yes, Jon Keyser. I've been doing primarily landscape and horse racing. However, I'm about to become a mobile maniac. I hit the road the end of the month, So look out, America. Yeah, Wonderful. Well, speaking of your work with horse racing probably won't be doing a lot of over this. There are some nice tele photos will be talking about some different lenses that you can add that actually will extend the capabilities on it. We're also gonna be talking about different things that you can add to the IPhone that gives it actually upto a 20 x telephoto where you shoot to the IPhone, but you have a really nice stabilized zoom lens shutter speeds. The critical shutter speed is the critical thing, but the shutter speed actually can be quite good with the IPhone. And the one of the nice things about the IPhone now is as a default setting. It shoots an HDR every time you press the shutter and out of those three shots and now does a to three shot. I'm HDR combining. It's using the sharpest image out of the three for the sharpness of the picture, and it's using the other two for tonality. It's automatically doing an anti ghosting every single time you press the button instantaneously, and with that you can get some very sharp pictures with it. But that 10 frames a second burst mode. If for some reason you were able to get close enough at 10 frames a second, with at least 100 photos available at that speed. That high speed aspect is awesome. Then, of course, now you've also got the high speed video up to 240 frames a second. And that also would be an amazing thing. That could be the situation where you set up your IPhone next to the track, pulled before the race started and actually shoot at that high speed video. Once they've gone bound and gone by, retrieve your IPhone and, uh, and see what you get. So we'll be talking about that. That high speed aspect of both shooting and video. Yes, I'm Laurie, Dodi, And, um, I have done outdoor and I like doing close up and good variety of stuff my granddaughters, of course, on and the mobile I am. I am absolutely the person you just talked about without the TV. I don't do the TV part, but I have many nights I should have been sleeping, and I've been playing with that instead. I've always been a keep it really person not wanting to look processed. So this'll has playing with my phone has gotten me out of that box and exploring that. So I'm very excited about exploring that further today. Awesome. Fantastic. Well, again, I think it's gonna be appropriate because all of us have got a smartphone. Whether you've got a knife phone or an android based point or one of the Windows phones, I'm afraid the Windows platform, even though there's some very nice cameras and over 40 megapixels or possible with some of the Windows based phones, the number of APS that are written for that platform is limited. So we really we won't be spending a lot of time with that. And, um, and fortunately, wouldn't the When we talk about Android today, we'll be focusing on those APS primarily on the IOS system, because it's easier for us toe project our IPhone to the studio audience, that at home audience than it is for the android. So we'll be focusing on this, but I'll be focusing on APS that are gonna be on the android as well as on the IPhone. I will be talking about my favorite new android based camera, which is awesome, and there's some other ones to Panasonic Blue Mix is just coming out with a um, mobile phone camera. That's got a one inch sensor on it, a ridiculously large sensor on it and looks to be really great. I've got this one right here. This will be our camera that would be talking about when I demonstrate some android app. So this is the galaxy to I'm camera, which is an awesome camera. 23 to 2 10 Zoom on it stabilized, um 18 mega pixel. It's a fantastic camera. And it has all the built in APS that you can download from the play Android PlayStation play store and which means that you can shoot with a huge telephoto range. You can take advantage of all the things like stabilized environment. You can use their built in APS, which are amazing. They got more built in APS than the Iowa system that are fantastic, doing things like shows, slow shutter and even night sky photography nights Guy time lapse. Very, very cool, and you can download all the other APs. So as an example, you can shoot something and jump right into snap seed right from your camera roll and, um, go back and forth and it's wonderful. It's a great, great camera I love it because it has that incredibly practical zoom range on it. It's one of the most practical zoom ranges you'd have starting down a 23 millimeters wide angle. When you're talking about like landscape, it's an amazing camera. Its android base does play with the IPhone, and, of course, it uses WiFi, not cell service. So it's not actually a phone. Um, the Galaxy one camera, which I don't recommend, was actually a camera where there was a phone with a built in camera and you had to actually use the phone service in order to use it. And Samsung actually did, I think, a really good idea by taking it, realizing that it's primarily a camera, that you can do everything with your email and Web surfing everything else with it, but focus on the camera aspect of it, and they've done an excellent, excellent job of it. So with that, let's throw in, go into some samples, um, of some of the stuff that I play around with this one we'd mentioned. Panorama is, um, absolutely love. The pant panorama is in the IPhone, and I'll actually in comparison things like the android based ones and other ones. I don't think there's any other mobile environment that comes close to matching these, especially now with the IPhone six and six plus that, like I mentioned, goes over 40 megapixels in a panorama. The thing is, is that with six versus the five and five s, which will be comparing a little bit talking about the specs And should you upgrade? Yes, just default setting. Yes, I'm afraid. You know there are. Sometimes we would say we'll talk about the difference between the six and six plus, that's up to you. The six plus actually does have an optically stabilized lens the first time that Apple's had that. But aside from that, the cameras are very similar in terms of testing, even with that optically stabilized situation, unless you're shooting under very low light, probably not gonna be a dramatic difference. But again, a lot of us we don't care about dramatic difference. If there's any benefit, we want it. The main benefit for the six plus is gonna be the larger screen size because you're living your entire life doing this, tweaking images, so that's pretty darn cool. And of course, it has a longer battery life. So for a lot of us who are shooting our heads off those three things, the plus, I actually have minor in order. I ordered four of these on the day that they were launched, and a T and T. Said you can't really? You meant that was a mistake. You didn't mean to order four. Come on. So we'll just cancel your order. We can't afford so anyway, So now my six plus is on the way. But speaking about Panorama is this is actually with the five s. And this is obviously nighttime handheld, no tart tripod at a Hotel Del down in San Diego. And every single thing about this is wrong. You should not shoot Panos, Handheld. You shouldn't do it at night, handheld. You shouldn't do it with your cell phone handheld at night. And the fact that you can get this is even a low rez image of it, not the full resolution that you can pull off this kind of work in a night. Pano is just wrong on so many levels. Wonderful levels that I just I absolutely love it. Other panels is down in Caribbean. I love panels. Not only because it gives me the larger file size. But in terms of storytelling, wonderful way to tell a story of an environment. This is again also down in the Caribbean. The neat thing about this one is this was actually shot with an IPhone that's also fly this with this waterproof case again. You can see all the toys that we've got going on here, so we're going to cover that after a break. But this is a the water shot diving case. This thing can actually go over 100 feet underwater, which I don't know why you do that cause there's no light down there and you're gonna have to be adding supplemental strobes. And also, that's kind of silly. I got the heavy duty one because I shoot surfing in waves and the 10 frame per second burst mode shooting. You know, waves is actually pretty cool, and it's indestructible. But aside from that, I don't recommend this case because it doesn't have a touch screen. You have to use dedicated buttons, but it does have an excellent optical wide angle. Zoom to it, which is excellent for video or, in the case of three D uh um, Panorama Photography. What wide angle lenses, Whether something like this or something. Even like the olo clip it allows you to do instead of 270 degrees, which is the default setting for the IPhone at 270. It stops this one because you're getting a much wider field of view. You're still limited to 270 degrees, but not really, because actually, since you're grabbing so much, you're doing more than 360 degrees in a pan. Oh, so this right here is this fence right here so you can see that I'm shooting past This is this palm tree. Is this palm tree here? And yet it's stitches. Another thing that should be illegal with Panorama is you don't shoot a panorama with a fish. I be virtually impossible with a big boy camera to do that to match up the perspective. But since the IPhone is shooting in tiny little, um, serious to edit, edit, edit it a dot these little teeny slices almost like how Photoshopped stitches a pan over. You ever seen the masks that photo shop does when it does a photo merge sees little teeny slices it shoots this way. And that means that you can, even with a fish, I do these ridiculous, um, stitches because it's being done on the fly in the camera. Okay. And you get that same idea here, also down the Caribbean. This is the shot. Let's see if we've got a full rez on this one. This isn't even a pole rez as well. This is that situation. I was just mentioning a vertical pano, which usually on your big boy camera. The problem is, is vanishing point. As soon as you go off a level tripod and go up, things were going toe. Get smaller at the top and you go down. They're going to get wider at the bottom is their closer to you. So these distortions Have you ever tried to stitch a Pano? Get these weird mushroom just psychotic stitches. And certainly any time you have fine little lines, your potential of actually getting those tow line up is impossible, especially with wide angle lens. Everything about this is wrong because this has a built in gyroscope. It knows where its position is in three D space. It can actually compensate for the four shortening and perspective of being awful level tripod. It's also why you can actually look up and shoot a Pano like this and have it still have a straight horizon line. Something you cannot do with your big girl camera. You look up and do a pan. Oh, and then you stitch it. What's gonna happen? You're going to get an exaggerated bow because it's going to say that's the only way I'm gonna be able to file. Oh, follow that Horizon line is by doing this bow and again. So that's using the technology to do some awesome stuff again. Down the Caribbean with the filmic pro group when we get into video will talk about filmic pro, the world's best video shooting app. That is amazing, but this is we were shooting down the Star Clipper cruise line. So this is Pano and then doing post processing on it and getting a little HDR using snap See, which will be spending a good chunk of time on. Yes, I do shoot a lot of panoramas pentagrams from the water, Um, when you're shooting panels and, um, sometimes you can, especially when you're not seeing what you're shooting and you're doing kind of hard to follow that horizon line. There are times when bringing it into photo shop to do some final tweaking. If you get that little wobbly horizon line, there are excellent tools, specifically adaptive wide angle built into Photoshopped that will allow you to do that final polishing of your image, which is something we will also talk about at the end of the day. In that, um, do I ever worked on my desktop on my mobile photographs? Yes. Especially for that final noise reduction sharpening. And if I am gonna print them out like we've got tear, Um, I'm going to do that. I'm gonna do my final checking on my desktop. The vast majority of APS on your mobile devices, whether android or IOS don't let you see it 1 to 1 pixel ratio there are always giving you a representation of that. They don't let you zoom in 100%. Some maps to a few of them do, but most don't. And so it's ridiculous to do any kind of final sharpening or check for things like noise on your mobile device. So don't do it. If you are going to go out to print. Um, make sure that you bring it onto your desktop and do your final checking and make sure there's nothing you know. You go well, then it's no longer mobile photography. If you open it up in your desktop malarkey, it's a photograph. You know, do whatever you need to make it look pretty okay over a Mulligan. You can see this thing to take a little straightening over the horizon line. I'm going to see some other shots. Um, that are one of the nice things about this panel that is shooting sequentially is you can shoot things that are close up. And then as you move away, Teoh the scene being in the distance, it'll actually compensate for that. And so you can get ah, focus on almost a macro situation all the way to the distance. And that right there is again in comparison to what you would normally get with your big boy camera. I have a a shot down here from the Grand Canyon that I got a lot of Pan owes. By the way, um, you know that, um, you're aspect ratio if you are in the bridge, which I'm in here obviously did bring these images in. You know that one of the ways that you can filter images in both light room and in the bridge is you can go down here over to the left hand side, under filter right, and under filtering work. And, you know, look for PNG's urge a pig Arar, Whatever else file format. But you go down to aspect ratio. Say, just show me all the panoramic sea and now every single one of your panorama is automatically shows up so you can work on just those or any aspect ratio is you can see here, including I can say these that are virtually Panorama is as well. So here. Now I'm looking at all the panorama is that were shot just a few weeks ago down in the Grand Canyon and the one specifically that I wanted to show here, since we're starting off showing panoramas and we can even, uh is probably is gonna be down here. It's one of my first ones. Is this one here where I'm shooting up? I'm literally on top of this flower. OK, which again ridiculously cool. And yet I'm going all the way back to the back of the canyon, which is probably, you know, a mile away in one single panorama on my bloody cell phone. Just by going, we're going to go into some little tips related to that and where you should be rotating from, Especially if you have a close up item like that. But that shot right there at Nick Nick is with goose bumps, because it's just really cool. Way to tell a story. And for you to be able to shoot, you know, from basically a close up macro shot almost down to infinity is is freakishly cool. I'm actually what we've got this one open. Let me just do a a few other panoramas. Since they're so close, most of these gonna be processed. We're going to see, um, a few here? Yes. Are they going to be processed? So they're gonna be over processed? Well, they're they're from me, and so they're going to be over processed. But, um, again, this, uh, this is shot with the, uh I don't even know if I had my six yet. I think these were all taken with the five s here. You can see my feet. Okay, So I am getting in the scene, looking in one of these side canyons to the Grand Canyon and then going all the way up here. So I'm getting, um, a full wide angle. If we goto this one here. This is the sky, and this is the sky. And basically, I'm just putting my arm over the canyon, suspending it gently, which I also recommend that you get like, a little mono pod. I've got a mono pod there. And, um, that would allow you to go up and shoot panoramas of a cloud of a crowd scene. You know, it's amazing. You had another three feet two years. Perspective. Every single photograph you've ever taken is usually at eye level. You know, maybe you go down, but most of our photograph photography is is when we're standing. You had three feet or you get down on your, you know, on your chest and shoot from the grass level. Either one of those is a whole another world. So something in this case I'm using my hand. But to be able to go up from the sky and then get this canyon looking straight down into the skin canyon back up. The other side, back up to the sky is just to fun in another vertical panel of our little sand dunes in there, this is another one. Some of the little tide pools, backwaters, rillettes and then going down. I I always carry my feet with me, so I often will add them as part of this scenario. Um, love, love these here. Let's see. Some of these have not been tweaked. We may tweak some of these later on again. Another one, the one Siri's again, even in a moving boat to be able to do that. But one of my favorites, this is actually is a pan. Oh, it's not a cave that's actually is just a little overhang, but it looks like a cave, and this one was done with photo sent. Not with the built in app. You'll notice the edges here, and you'll notice we also have three different rows of images. Photosynth by Microsoft. One of the best things they've ever done is great because it allows you to shoot a row of images, go down, shoot another road, images go down, shoot another row of images, you do completely 360 degrees. But the benefit is that you're getting this really dramatic almost fish eye view. Um, and that's something you can't get with a built in IPhone app. You have one row at your disposal in the IPhone app, and this actually is a story that I could not have told because I couldn't look up and all the way down So Photosynth and will be for those of you getting the class will have all the apse listed.