Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Videotastic


After all that messing about with sequencing, I thought I’d mess about with video. This has been made with iMovie and really it couldn’t be simpler. iMovie imports all the video on your machine – not that much in my case as I don’t actually have a video camera and have to rely on the video from my camera and strangely it didn’t catch the movies from Ratter’s Flip camera – but it’s enough to play with.

Putting the clips together and trimming the various clips is also pretty simple, although I’d like to be able to see the audio waveform when trimming, rather than simply hearing it, to ensure I got the trimming absolutely spot on. However, given I haven’t bothered to read any documentation or view anything other than the opening You Can Do This movie, I’m sure there are ways to do this. In any case it doesn’t seem to have proved too much of a deterrant to getting the cuts in the right place.

Anyway, this is a video of the Boon cavorting to my latest tune Kyle.


Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Dawn of the apps


It’s all starting to come together. A few weeks ago I discovered a peculiar thing. I’ve always carried a small camera with me ever since the days of the original Cannon Ixus, more for a sense of ‘it’ll be there when I need it’ than any really coherent plan. I’ve worked my way up from film to digital to really proper 5 megapixel + digital. And the more digital and costless it’s become the more I’ve been using it. However, recently I’ve been leaving it at home and there it sits getting ever more lonely.
So what has brought about this change? Have I just stopped taking pictures or what? Obviously if you look at this blog or my Flickr photostream you’ll see I haven’t, so what is going on?
The fact is I’ve downgraded, or not so much downgraded as sidestepped. I’m still carrying a camera only instead of boasting super focusing and loads of manual control like the Ixus, it boasts pretty crap resolution but a host of fantastic add-ons. It is of course my iPhone. And the single most compelling reason for using it as my main camera is the ability it gives me to adapt, publish and share my pictures.
Using relatively inexpensive apps, like ColorSplash, Photogene, and Mobile Fotos, I can take pictures, colour correct them, crop them and play with them, then upload them immediately to my Flickr page. It’s a revelation.
Of course it would be doubly great if the camera in the iPhone wasn’t such a dog, but what really surprised me was that I found the immediacy offered by the iPhone/app/Flickr combination far outweighed the superiority of the Ixus images. Sure I’ll still use the Ixus for my big Hockneyesque collages, but for everything else the apps have it.


Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Colorsplash


Another neat little app for the iPhone, Colorspash is probabably the best £1.19 I’ve spent recently.
Colorsplash strips the colours from your iPhone photos, then lets you put it back in a finger painting style. Simple to use and with the best help system of any app I’ve played with, this is both powerful and fun to use. It is also highly versitile, allowing me to fine tune the feathers of The Diva’s boa.
There has been a growing trend for apps that make the iPhone into a truly creative platform – painting and photographic ones especially – and Colorsplash is a great,fun addition to these.

The Diva in performance mode

The Boys discover bottle throwing