There Really Is An App For That: Instagram

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First and foremost, happy 4th to everyone! I thought the first picture was appropriate for the occasion, in order to show off another cool app that I discovered. It's called Instagram and it's of course on the iPhone. Another great thing that you'll be happy to hear is that it's completely free meaning there's not even any ads and that's sometimes rare.

What is Instagram? Obviously it's a picture app but it's also so much more in that it's a photo sharing app.  What's great about this, is that you can apply 16 awesomely cool special effect filters to any photo you choose from your phone's library or a photo that you take, then share them on an Instagram social network, Twitter, or Facebook.

The following is just a few examples of the special effect filters that you can take advantage of with before and after examples:

Before

After Instagram applied

Before

There Really Is An App For That: Tiny Planet

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Today, while checking out any iPhone photo apps worth downloading, I came across a really interesting one called Tiny Planet. I guess what it does is shrink your images into bit size miniatures of a tiny planet. I tried it out on prairie dog image that I shot awhile back and I got the following result:

Before: Everything is normal in prairie dog world....

After: Until it's flipped upside down

All in all, kind of a fun app to play with it and it's free.

There Really Is An App For That: HDR For Free

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I have to admit that sometimes I don't take the best photos. The easiest thing to do is to blame it on the fact that it was cloudy that particular day. We've all been there but there's really no excuse when you can easily find an app for that.

I'm pretty sure I found that golden egg of an app; for this particular purpose anyway. To show you what I mean, below is a sampling of shots I took while on vacation. I put these ordinary shots through the app called HDR for Free that I downloaded on my iPhone and posted the result below in the before and after. Also, without getting too technical, for those of you that don't know, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range.

Before: A cloudy day in January in Key Largo. Yes, even Key Largo gets cloudy.



After: Looking at the after result, I almost feel like every cloudy day can be a good day

Before: This was one of the few days that it wasn't cloudy on my vacation but I decided to apply the HDR filter to this anyway to see what the result would be.

After: Looks like it could be from a resort/travel mag. No wonder they have such good shots in those.


Needless to say, there's no doubt that I'll be coming back to this app. I hope I've shown you that there is hope for disappointing and dull cloudy day shots. There's really no excuse anymore. The HDR For Free app is a winner. Yes, it really is free.

Note: These were taken with a low res point and shoot camera 2 years ago. I've upgraded since then to a digital camera that takes better and higher resolution shots. Check them out in the post entitled: As The Ducks Swiw In
More about about my newer camera in future posts.