Printic is a new service that mixes two popular cultural movements. The first is that nostalgic pull back towards the days when we actually got to hold our pictures in hand; the second, the square crop, retro, lo-fi movement.
So what do you get when you combine these two? You get a service that lets you select and crop photos directly from your phone, and send Polaroid-style high-quality prints to whomever for just $1 a piece. Read more…
Last week, Apple unexpectedly booted 500px’s photo sharing app from the iTunes App Store. At the time, Apple said that the issue was the app’s ability to search for photos featuring artistic nudity. Since then, reports have also stated that Apple received complaints of child pornography in the App, leading 500px to launch an ultimately unsuccessful search for these images.
Whatever the issue was, it seems it has been fixed to Apple’s specifications. The app is now back in the iOS app store and available to download. Read more…
360 Panorama has come a long way since we first shared it two years ago, going from an unpolished app with some highly negative reviews to one of the most popular camera appears boasting thousands of reviews and a 4.5 star rating.
It has come so far that this week Apple selected it as the iTunes Free App of the Week. Read more…
Instagram is holding onto its place as the darling of the mobile photo sharing world. After adding a whopping two million new users in a month thanks to Thanksgiving and the release of the iPhone 4S, the app now has a shiny new trophy for its shelf: it has been selected as Apple’s “iPhone App of the Year“. The future is looking extremely bright for the 13-month-old, 7-man company: Goldman Sachs recently designated it as a potential IPO candidate and founder Kevin Systrom expects the membership base to double once the Android version arrives.
A couple days ago it was discovered that iPhones, iPods, and iPads running iOS 5 have a secret panorama mode that’s hidden in the operating system. The feature can be enabled, but featured either a jailbroken device or knowledge in how to edit a particular iOS 5 preference file. Luckily for non-hackers, Redmond Pie has discovered an easy way to do this by taking advantage of iTune’s backup feature. This tutorial will teach you how to get the panorama feature unlocked in 5-10 minutes. Read more…
If you look at the Top 100 Movies chart in the iTunes Store, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary, but one of the movies (#43) is actually a no budget film shot using a single Canon 5D Mark II. For Lovers Only” is a romance filmed by Mark Polish and Michael Polish — known as the Polish brothers — over the course of just 12 days with a single actress (Mark himself played the male lead). The film has already generated over $200,000 in profits after being spread through word of mouth via social networks.
The brothers said that their hotels and some meals were comped; they shot and edited with equipment they already owned; and they don’t consider the few grand worth of meals, taxis and the like to be part of an actual budget. “There was not one dime that came out of our pocket specifically for this movie — besides the food we ate, but we had to eat, anyway,” Michael said.
In the end, Michael and Mark even had to make up some names for the film’s title sequence, which they wanted to stretch out to a reasonable length in order to fit the score that had been written by their friend Kubilay Uner. [#]
This is a great example of how the landscape for movie making, distribution and viewing is rapidly changing, allowing anyone armed with a prosumer DSLR and a whole lot of talent to potentially strike it big.
Cameras usually hide what it’s shooting from you when the sensor is capturing light, so you can’t watch slow shutter speed photographs as they’re being shot. Magic Shutter is an app for the iPhone that shoots these long exposure using the camera’s video feed, which allows you to see the photograph as its being “developed” on the screen.
Due to limitations Apple places on video resolution, this app currently only spits out low res images (though an update with 1MP photos is coming soon). If you want to play with it you can find it for $3 in the iTunes store.
Many of Sony’s new digicams have a nifty “Sweep Panorama” feature that allows you to create panoramas of up to 224 degrees by sweeping your camera across a scene. The camera then takes the numerous frames it captured during the sweep and combines them together into a panorama for you.
If you own an iPhone, a new app called 360 Panorama allows you to go a step further. Instead of creating traditional panoramas, the app lets you quickly create 360 degree panoramas by sweeping your camera in every direction. Each 360 panorama should take about 20 seconds to create, with the app filling in pieces of the panorama on an on-screen grid as you’re sweeping.
Now for a couple downsides. First, due to the app’s processor intensive nature, it’s only available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. Also, the app has iffy reviews on the iTunes store, with customers saying that it’s a work in progress. Still, it’s a pretty neat idea, and if they get it working smoothly and correctly it would be a nice feature to add to your phone for a cool $3.
The Royal Family is really getting into social media: in addition to their YouTube channel, Twitter, and series of iTunes podcasts, the Family now has a Flickr account which went live to the public this morning. Currently, the British Monarchy’s photostream contains 683 uploads of both recent and older historical photographs. According to an announcement from the Royal Collection, photos will be continually added to the account. The Flickr account launch was scheduled to coincide with the summer opening of Buckingham Palace. Some of the images featured on the photo-sharing site are to be featured in the exhibit, The Queen’s Year, which opens tomorrow at the Palace.
LEGO recently released a free iPhone app that turns your photographs into photomosaics made with 1×1 LEGO pieces. The app obviously isn’t limited to faces, but can turn anything into a LEGO mosaic.
Sadly, LEGO didn’t integrate a way that allows you to quickly order the exact number of pieces of each color required to create the mosaics you create. That feature would have made the app much more useful and profitable for LEGO, especially if the app takes off.
