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Slow Shutter Cam iPhone 4 app beat my Canon T1i?

By Dennis Guten on February 9, 2011 No Comments

The University where I work, UT Dallas, is closed today due to the sleet and snow that fell overnight here in Dallas. While I was having breakfast I was watching the weather show out our front window and thought to myself that it would be fun to take a few snow/sleet pictures with an iPhone 4 app I bought recently for 99ยข called Slow Shutter Cam by Cogitap Software.

I wanted to see if the app would be good at actually showing the snow falling. I had taken a shot last week in the snow with the app and knew it could do it, but I wanted to expand upon the idea and match the iPhone 4 app against my Canon T1i DSLR camera to see which one did a better job with the shot.

So I set up the Canon on a tripod and framed a shot shooting through our front window out into the street. I tried to match the shot view as best I could with the iPhone. I took a number of shots with the Canon, shooting at different shutter speed/aperture combinations trying to get a slow enough shutter speed to capture the snow and sleet falling.

My results amazed me! I was using a Canon Ultrasonic 28-105mm 3.5-4.5 lens which gave me an f22 at the 28mm end. The shots I am showing were taken at 28mm f22 at 1/15th sec. exposure time (second shot) and 28mm f22 at 0.4 sec. exposure time (third shot). The iPhone 4 shot is at the top.

The iPhone 4 shot was the only one that really shows the snow and sleet falling. I just could not get any action out of the Canon DSLR in this situation. At 1/15th of a second, the DSLR had totally washed out the shot and obviously I needed at least a 3 second or longer shutter speed to capture the falling stuff.

The iPhone 4 handled it very easily giving me a shutter speed of 15 seconds at a sensitivity level in the app of 1. This was the best combo of settings I tested for the app. The actual size of the photo it gave me was 1936 x 2592 pixels, which is a good size, but not as large as the raw from the Canon, which was 4572 x 3162 pixels. I cropped them all down to the same pixel size and tried to keep the shot parameters the same. You can also click on these three shots to see a larger version of each.

Oh, and I did not use a tripod with the iPhone 4, I simply held it flush up against the window and held it steady through the 15 second exposure.

I will have to play around with this app some more using light trails and other experiments. You can take a look at the app on the Cogitap Software website where it goes into much more detail about the settings available and features. There is a link on the site directly to the iTunes store where you can read reviews as well or purchase the app.

For a buck this is a great steal of a photo app. If anyone else has tried this app I would love to hear about what you have tried to do with it.

Categories : Apple, iPhone, Photography, Software
Tags : Camera App, Canon, DSLR, iPhone 4, iTunes, Photography

Simple panoramic images in seconds with the iPhone app 360 Panorama

By Dennis Guten on January 30, 2011 No Comments

I purchased an iPhone app for photography a few weeks ago called 360 Panorama. It was late at night, so I tried it out from bed and the light was so low that the results were really poor, so I promptly forgot about it amidst the glut of apps on the phone.

So a few days ago I was doing my daily campus walk at Ut Dallas, where I work as a Web Designer and I found myself in the center of the campus, which had recently been renovated and redesigned. I remembered 360 Panorama and pulled the iphone out and took a quick full 360 degree photo from this spot.

Panoramic image of the UT Dallas campus

Well, in the phone itself, it’s pretty hard to see if the shot was good, but when I got back to the office I emailed the photo to myself and opened it up on my iMac and it was really nice. It comes out with this odd white border all around the shot where the app mixes the pieces of the shot together. A quick trip to Adobe Fireworks, my editor of choice, and the result was a great panoramic shot of the campus!

The full-size panoramic image is available if anyone wants to download it.

There are not too many controls, you choose either a white or black background for the uneven edges, push start and slowly and carefully move the camera around.

My boss thought it was cool and wants me to try it in a few months when the greenery comes back and to use a tripod. I’ll do that with the little iPhone 4 accessory I purchased recently called the Glif, which allows you to attach the iPhone 4 to a tripod.

360 Panorama is only $1.99 and well worth it in my opinion. Anybody else tried this app yet? What are your opinions?

Categories : Apple, iPhone, Photography, UT Dallas

Eric Roachs’ shot of Ruthie and myself

By Dennis Guten on December 26, 2010 2 Comments

My friend and fellow photographer, Eric Roach, sent me this image after our holiday lights tour the other night. It was a great shot with lots of sparkly lights in the background and my smiling wife at my side. All I did to the shot was crop it, no other changes were made in Fireworks (my image editor of choice).

I’ll have to download some of the gazillion images off my own DSLR and get some of the posted here. Thanks Eric.

Here is a larger version of this image.

Categories : Family Stuff, Photography, Ruthie
Tags : Eric, Fireworks, Photography, Ruthie
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