I have my iPhone two weeks and a half now. Let’s do some quick usage stats . I have already 5 home screens. I have currently installed 38 apps in addition to the stuff which came with it. Quick look at iTunes receipt- I downloaded 56 apps altogether (and counting). Hmmmm. I have on my iPhone 6 are photo apps, 1 I use really heavily. This one is called CameraKit, and I chose it from among other apps as I figured it is a good fit to my needs. Its develop options include B&W or sepia conversion, soft focus and dodge/burn at different levels, vignetting and cross-processing (I will come back to it in one of future iPhone posts). Somehow, the crop for example is not so important to me.
Today’s image is the best example of use of iPhone as handy camera- I took this picture on my way to work one morning last week. The fog was just so beautiful, that I stopped, got out of the car and snapped a series of images. I got it ready for blog using Camera Kit, even figured out how to add same watermark and size for blog. Now I will add it to post, again using iPhone app . Cool.

Looking for a topic for today’s gallery, and not having any “fresh work” done past weekend, I realized I have a lot pictures, beautiful images of Utah never shown before on the blog, from my Four Corners vacation this spring. It was so long ago, that I almost forgot I had any vacation this year! Anyway, I went back and prepared a small gallery of some of my favorite shots, trying to make it very diverse at the same time. There might be one or two, which was already on the blog.

This place is not far from my house. On the beautiful lake. The spot with a bench where you can sit down, relax and enjoy the view. So calm, and although there is a lot of hikers, especially on the evenings and weekends, you can still have some solitude.
I really enjoy this image, I took one evening with my Fisheye. I wanted to use this particular lens to show what is around the bench, the trees, as well as the sunset and the colors of the sky.

For quite some time I wanted to make a panorama photo we could put on the wall. Being at AirVenture gave me the opportunity to shoot one. Here it is. Using fisheye let me to shoot just two shoots and made stitching them much easier. Next week I’ll show you how it presents on the wall.

It almost doesn’t happen. When I saw Ace, my cat, lay on sofa in a very photographic position, I didn’t really believe I will get a picture. It was rather dark in the evening in our living room. I had to go, take a camera from the shelf, find and put on my fastest prime, and come back. He not only was still there, he let me take a series of photographs, from which I picked the one. With him being black and white, there seem to be no need of color on this image, but I took my time to selectively decrease saturation on the green of quilt, and pink of rose pattern.

I had a nice picture lined up for a blog today. But it upset me so much, it gets a priority!

A couple of months passed since my attendance in second Worldwide Photo Walk. I didn’t win the photo contest, but had a lot of fun meeting other photographers in the area. Until recently, I thought about this as of a great experience. But things that happened recently made me reconsider my future participation.

What happened? Scott Kelby joined spammers ranks and started branding junk emails offering different photography products. When I need something, I look it up in Google, compare prices at leading internet retailers, check reviews on blogs or boards. But I never get influenced by emails sent to my Inbox. Mostly because they end up in trash as fast as they get there (if my Spam won’t do it for me).

The question is though – are you really that greedy Mr. Kelby? Isn’t the money you already got from sponsors and the promotion you did for them during the walk enough? Do you really have to spam people to make ends meet? I went through what is available on the Photo Walk website and couldn’t find any, even in the finest print, information that Scott Kelby reserves a right to spam my Inbox indefinitely with mails trying to sell me something. My email address is as private as my SSN number and if I wished to give it to Lensbaby, Nikon, Adobe or whomever else I’d rather do it myself carefully deciding who is worth my trust. Apparently first point in the F.A.Q. stating that ‘Photo Walk (is a) social photography event where photographers get together’ should have added ‘and leaves their emails to Scott Kelby so he can sell them’.

I’m simply disgusted.

I am coming back to this image. I cannot pinpoint what it is that draws me to it. I would wish the boat was closer, bigger, more in focus. But as it is, you still know it is there, and your eye goes there. And I like how the trees frame the part of the lake around the boat. And all this lush green- it was wet, thus really green summer on Midwest this year! Bye, bye summer. I am up for some autumn photographs.

Time again to show an iPhone photo. I have some stuff about apps and macro capabilities of this device coming, but so far- I am still reading and learning. So one straight of camera- well, almost. I found Lightroom very eager to get the photos out of iPhone .
Anyway, the huge advantage of iPhone as camera is having it with you all the time. I can take photos of things around when we go shopping, for example, which opens new subjects for me. This one was taken outside our local mall. The lamp above the pot with flowers looked just like  a full moon.

For a Gallery Monday, I have something different today. I was thinking about this project for a while, and taking photos for it for more then a year. I have no idea why the stairs interest me so much, but they also seem to be everywhere. Today’s gallery is a portfolio-type project, a collection of images taken in parks around Iowa and processed in the same way. The way it is different is that I will be adding to this gallery, every time I will take a picture fitting to its subject. Also, the blog photo is repeated in the gallery, which I have not done before. As usual, click on the photo or a link in the text to view all stairs.

I was out on a party yesterday. Believe it or not, on a farm. Very cool place for a party, both for a photographer or just a regular person . I always liked it, anyway. Now I have additional fun, as they have horses, cattle, chickens- all of those are fun to photograph during a “cocktail hour”. Trust it to cow not to move for just below a second altogether .