Tablet and Mobile

Archive for December, 2011

Unlike previous models, iPhone 4 has a reasonable camera on it – and iPhone 4s even better. Yet time and time again I see people churning our terrible photos and videos using these devices.

The following are just a few tips to ensure you get the best from your iPhone.

Firstly – the deal-breakers:

Lighting – if you know the lighting will be poor, forget it. The iPhones are awful at handling low light, often resulting in blurring and grainy images.

Sound – ever stood in a church or large school hall – that kind of hollow sound (which is related to echo but faster) – the internal microphone in the iPhone suffers from such effects at just a few feet from the mic (like most phones). Get a plug-in external mic – preferably with a long lead. Maplins do a great lapel-mic (though I had to change the plug to make it fit the iPhone  – I’m sure an adaptor is available).

Tripod – no matter how hard you try, holding iPhone by hand is not going to work well – you can remove shake in software but it doesn’t hold a candle to starting off with the phone mounted on a rock-solid surface such as a decent tripod. Look up eBay for suitable clamps. There’s a tripod here but I would not recommend sticking the zoom lens on – pictures look awful..

Dirt and Grease – the big let-down here is the lens – the slightest bit of grease, finger-print, dirt on the lens will ruin the quality because of its tiny size. Don’t even consider taking a video or pictures unless the lens is spotlessly cleaned with a soft, dry cloth (commonly known as an unused handkerchief).

Duration – you should always use the best quality settings to get high quality you need lots of memory – stick with videos segments of a few minutes each if possible or you’re going to spend all day getting the material onto your PC.

Here then is how I have managed to produce half-decent quality video, given decent lighting. I use an iPhone 4.

I purchased a tie-clip microphone from Maplins for under £20 – and this plugs into the iPhone (effectively preventing the speaker working while it is plugged in). The lead is 3 metres long, suitable for interviews. I had to change the plug for the iPhone).

The App I use is called Filmic Pro and It will take video at the highest quality (1280px * 720px, 24 frames/second) at 16:9 format – this ensures a quite reasonable image with no unpredictable changes occurring. Automatic sound level control is turned off.

The image below shows the controls – the one below that shows what they are for. Essentially you make sure the brilliance and focus are right, start the recording, set all 3 controls to ON… and start your video.

And below, the help screen.

The controls are easy – “focus lock” will stop the focus changing if someone walks past the camera. Modern low-cost autofocus systems work the wrong way – if they are just out of focus they go WAY out of focus – then work their way back toward sharp focus. “Exposure lock” stops the camera dimming if light levels change which they do all the time in any moving scene. “White balance” takes a little more thought – the camera wants to compensate for too much of any one colour – to get professional results you have to make sure the imagery looks right at the start – then use the control to LEAVE It that way.

Essentially you then make your recording – then using the normal iPhone lead to your PC, offload the file to the PC – doing this wirelessly might not be a good idea when the file is large. Incidentally the iPhone is probably not your best choice for long meetings or interviews – you will run out of memory – don’t be tempted to chose a lower quality setting. In a test I took a 2 minute video and the file was over 200MB long. So this approach is best for short interviews of a few minutes – or multiple scenes take at different locations.

The App is set to record at the highest setting, 24fps, 16:9 format.. and it outputs MOV files which you can then import into an editor.

Some more setting screenshots..

That’s it, if you want more information, let me know.

I can’t tell you how many photos I’ve seen taken on mobile phones that are WAY below their potential – purely and simply because people are not thinking. CLEAN THE LENS. Mobile phone camera lenses are TINY – the working area is extremely small – and so it doesn’t take much of a smudge or spec of dirt to ruin the image – especially in high-contrast shots. If your pictures look “hazy” there’s a good chance there’s a fingerprint or a load of dust in the back of the phone where the lens is.

Clean the lens before you take any photo. This simple, even trivial trick could dramatically improve your mobile photos.

Other tricks:

Another failing with mobile phones is bad lighting – they just are not that sensitive partly because of the lens size – small lens – not much light – it’s not rocket science. Get the best light you can for your photo. The lower the light level, the more grain and blurring you’ll see – it’s that simple.  It takes a very expensive camera to match our eyes for light sensitivity.

Avoid pointing into sunlight – the glare is likely to make even the slightest mark on the lens result  in bad pictures – and the cameras generally can’t handle the wide range of light levels anyway.

Enjoy taking your photos.

 

The subject of panoramas has always fascinated me – as a kid (I’m now 58) my dad bought me a Pentax camera for Christmas and that was the start of a very long hobby lasting years and taking in DIY film developing, joining a local photo club and generally exploring photography – hell, I even made a pinhole camera and made up large sheets of photopaper from the silver chemicals – try asking for silver halides in Boots today and see what advice you get. I can even remember some of the names of the nasty chemicals which if requested now might land one in a jail for terrorists.

Still, that’s all history and we do this stuff digitally now. I’ve had various cameras over the years from the full-on multi-lens jobs – to using the iPhone – quite an extreme range.

Why would I even class the iPhone as a “camera”? Well, one over-riding reason for looking to take pictures with your phone – is convenience – it simply isn’t convenient to wander all over the place with a large block of aluminium strapped to your neck – especially when it’s hot unless you’re a REAL enthusiast – I find myself doing this less and less – and so without realising it my “proper” camera has been relegated to the background over the last year and I find myself more and more inclined to making the best out of the iPhone.

I should clarify I’m talking about iPhone 4, the earlier models were basically naff as cameras. I’d like to discuss the iPhone 4s but my contract says I’m stuck with the current model for many months yet…

I travel – and my wife Maureen and I have a little place in Spain which we use as often as possible – I love scenery – always have and Spain has it by the boatload – but I think you’ll agree, breath-taking scenes look great to the human eye but once you get them on camera they are often usually a disappointment – normal photos just cannot capture the awe of nature – well, most of the time anyway (Life on Earth/Frozen Planet etc excluded – as Attenborough’s stuff is just, well, stunning).

I think there’s a reason we’re all moving to widescreen TV. Humans tend to look left and right, not up and down – no doubt that’s why the ridiculously wide screen cinema format is so popular. It just “feels right” – and panoramic photos take us one step nearer to capturing the excitement of reality.

Of course – one can go all the way and take 360 degree panoramas – they are just STUNNING – but not cheap to do – take a look at these…amazing.  Better, given special lenses, it’s possible to take all-round VIDEO that lets you turn around and look at different angles in live video… all of this will be common-place some day as now doubt will 3d (I’m just waiting for Apple to realise the potential for putting 2 cameras on the back of an iPhone and record everything in 3d). I prefer something I can stick in a blog.

For now –and for general purpose – I’ve spent some time looking at Apps for the iPhone together where appropriate with some PC-based man-power to help make better pictures.

If you want to experiment at making your own panoramas on the iPhone, I suggest you go grab the free Microsoft Photosynth and get out into the sunshine to have a play. Forget the fact it’s free – it’s brilliant. Look at the link I’ve sent on your PC – you’ll see lots of demos. The APP on the iPhone works a treat and creates pretty much seamless joins of separate images – even helping you to take them in succession.  It’s probably the best App to do the job.

What’s missing right now is a package that combines HDR and Panoramas – what do I mean by HDR? Well, the iPhone has HDR (high dynamic range) facilities – but they’re rubbish – the best I can suggest is that you get hold of the iPhone iCameraHDR app to see what I’m talking about.  Imagine taking a picture of scenery straight into the sun – it just doesn’t work – you get a white sun with no detail, or, if the camera is capable of stopping down, you get almost no detail in the scenery as the aperture has stopped down so much there’s not enough light coming in… you can’t have it all. Take a shot indoors with no special lighting – looking out of the window into bright light – you can have detail INSIDE the house or OUTSIDE – you can’t have both. The idea of the HDR apps is to take 2 or 3 different pictures, at different exposures and “merge” them together to try to get the best out of each.  It “kind of” works and the software can make the difference between a beautiful result or something that looks artificial and, well, crap.  How do we get around it as human beings with our own eyes?  Well, it’s not simple but our eyes do several things – as you look around a scene – your eyes adjust constantly – in a static photo that can’t happen – the whole thing has to be captured at once. Also the sensitivity of any part of your eye can change almost instantly – not as a whole – but individual parts (try staring at a coloured spotlight for a while and move away.. you’ll see the opposite colour because your eyes can de-sensitise even at the individual colour level). Again, cameras can’t do that – and to be honest the result if they could, might look a mess.

So one way around this is to use an HDR App to take several HDR pictures and then use software to stitch these together. It all gets a bit too much… and for PC editing there REALLY is not a lot out there to chose from – many packages are open source and frankly more hard work for less result.   But I have found ONE package, sadly the developers are not working hard on this – but it’s out there and available – Serif PanoramaPlus.  I’ve given you a YouTube link to their latest version but to be honest PanoramaPlus 3 is good enough if you can get it for under a tenner and there’s very little difference. Essentially what this package does is let you drag and drop any number of overlapping images into an area on the PC screen – press a button and…. you get your seamless panorama – and you know what – it just WORKS –  unless you’re really bad with a camera, no colour variation –it just produces absolutely excellent panoramas.

 

But here’s the thing – many panoramas suffer if there is movement because as the images overlap, which they must, if things move in those overlaps – you get a MESS… of course this can be fun – take 4 overlapping photos of a scene and have someone move to each of the areas before you take the shot. You can have all sorts of fun with this – the same person appearing several times in the shot.. but for some scenery it would be nice to think there is an easier way – and there is.  Take a video on your iPhone, grab some overlapping stills – bang them into PanoramaPlus – and there’s your panorama. It works well as long as there is no blurring of the stills in the video. Here’s an example..

The image above was taken in Spain – and covers over 180 degrees. I took a pan of the area with the iPhone  – and brought that image into my PC. I then used PicPICK to grab 4 stills from the video – and then dropped them into PanoramaPlus. All the panoramas BEFORE this (in this blog entry) were put together from stills. The PanoramaPlus is supposed to work with videos directly but it’ll not do iPhone videos hence the screen grabber. Any other method of grabbing stills will work just as well.

What about resolution you may ask?  If I told you that the original of that image you see above is nearly 6,000 pixels wide – is that high enough resolution? And yes, that was done with the iPhone 4 standard video camera.

That little outcrop of white buildings over to the left.. here there are at the original resolution. Not too shabby…

Here (below) is a screenshot of the PanoramaPlus software in action. Incidentally not only can you fire a bunch of left-right overlapping images – but up-down as well.  Standing in front of some great architecture, FAR too close to get the whole lot in one photo? No problem, take a bunch of overlapping photos and fire the lot in any order at this software and it will do the business for you. As you can imagine this is FAR, FAR more than simply overlapping some photos – the images have to be matched for colour and brightness and the software has to warp each image to make them “fit” as a whole – and somehow it DOES – usually in seconds, automatically, no intervention, no problem. I’ve taken 15 or more images of something and fired them into PanoramaPlus and it’s turned out a respectable result.

The software is DEAD easy to use and you have all sorts of control over the output – you can even generate panoramas ready to drop into a web page.  Check out the links I’ve given you and have fun experimenting. And yes, it’s CHEAP.

Here are a couple of other panoramas I made last year with this software (but using a standard SLR camera as I didn’t have the iPhone 4 at the time). Try clicking on these images to see higher-resolution versions….

Enjoy experimenting.