I have said it before, but I will say it again — my iPhone 5s makes for a pretty amazing camera that you can carry everywhere with you.

The image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Please attribute it to Peter Upfold and link to this page.

One of the reasons I do love the camera on my iPhone. It truly is remarkable the enormous power we carry in our pockets!

Happy Leap Day from this random cat!

Photo by Peter Upfold, available under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License, if you’d like to use it. My view in this case is that including the photo in a larger publication should not invoke the “Share Alike” clause, but modifications to the photo itself should.

I continue to really enjoy the iPhone 5s camera — it may not have a mind-boggling megapixel count, but it seems to do an amazing job with its autofocus and in particular, it seems to capture the light in a balanced way.

As always, the end of the year is a great opportunity to take stock, as well as look forward to what is coming next.

I thought I’d round off this year, a very successful one for me, with a few of my favourite photos I have taken on my countryside commute into work to help with that contemplative spirit!

I wish everyone a happy and successful New Year.

I have missed Instagram’s filters since it was gobbled up by Facebook — a change which meant I could not continue using it.

So, it is nice to have similar functionality in Path. The added bonus is that unlike in Instagram, your photo is not rescaled down to quite the same degree!

Above is a, hopefully tastefully subtle, use of Path’s filters in this photo of a horse in rural Dorset.

You just don’t see ’em anymore, especially not in full working order!

I am a of the iPhone app and web service Instagram. You can take great photos with the iPhone 4, but Instagram encourages making art from iPhone photography in a really interesting and fun way. I am by no means a professional photographer, but I do enjoy playing around with what can be achieved with the iPhone’s camera.

More recently, I have found myself using Instagram in a few unconventional ways to get some interesting results.

Using Instagram as a Post-Production Digital Zoom

While the iPhone 4 camera in many ways can be very competitive with many dedicated point and shoot cameras, one notable feature it lacks is an optical zoom. There’s a digital zoom — but I see little point in using it. Digital zoom merely degrades the quality of the photo you are taking — and you lose that quality permanently. If you want to crop the photo to have the effect of digital zoom, you can do that after taking the photo without losing any data.

And that’s what I have found myself doing quite a bit — I will take a photograph of something in the distance using the iPhone’s default Camera app, then enter Instagram, choose the new photo to bring into the app from the Camera Roll, and use the zoom and pan feature to ‘crop’ the Instagram version of the shot. I end up with the original, unfiltered photo in case I want to come back with that, and the cropped and filtered ‘arty’ version in Instagram.

Combining iPhone 4 HDR Photography with Instagram

The iPhone 4’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) feature, introduced shortly after the debut of the device, allows you to capture more of scenes with significant contrast between the lightest and darkest areas of an image. The iPhone’s HDR takes two photos in quick succession — one underexposed, one overexposed — and combines them together.

The results, frankly, are mixed, but there are many occasions where the iPhone 4᾿s HDR works really well to bring the colour of the sky out where it would otherwise be ‘blown out’.

Unfortunately, you can’t use the HDR feature within Instagram’s capture interface, so, again, I find myself using the iPhone’s default camera app to take the source photo, then importing into Instagram later. The result is that you can combine the HDR shot with the filters and other enhancements in Instagram for an even better end result.

Conclusion

These two techniques I have developed might be quite obvious to many people — and could even be described as a bit fiddly, with having to exit and enter different apps. I have found them, however, a really good way to make even more out of a fantastic free app.

If you want to follow my images on Instagram, my username there is peteru.

So yesterday and the evening before that we had a little bit of snow here in Reading. It’s very unusual to get snow here in October, so quite a novelty.

This is a photo I took with my phone from outside the window of my room here in Bridges Hall, on the university’s Whiteknights campus.