My GPS Camera Phone

This was a fun exercise in Photoshop filter application. Many times, filters are overdone and abused, causing the image to look worse than it did originally. However, when applied in moderation, they can produce interesting results.

The image here was shot with my camera phone, as usual, and then edited in Photoshop CS. After a bit of cropping, I added a level adjustment layer to even out the colors. Then a single, overhead light was rendered to brighten up the center and darken the edges, adding a little more depth and drama. After that, I added a 40% pinch distortion, followed by a gentle ocean ripple. All of this was then covered up with a layer of clouds set to 15% opacity.

The image itself was a snapshot of the setting sun’s rays between the clouds as seen from my office window. (I get some great sunsets.) While the original shot was nice, I didn’t want to post another sunset photo. So I inverted it and applied the steps above, producing something that looks more like water than air.

With that said, I task you to start thinking of strange and unorthodox ways to capture photos with your camera phone. After that, try something even stranger in your favorite photo editing software. With a little imagination (and sometimes a lot of moderation!), you can produce something far beyond the ordinary.

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Nancy and I received a late Christmas gift to ourselves on Tuesday – cell phone data transfer software! I know, how exciting!

This is a big deal because our phones do not have removable memory or Bluetooth. (For what it’s worth, they will survive submersion for up to 20 minutes and are indestructible.) What this means is that trying to get pictures over ~300K off the phone was impossible (more on that later). Needless to say, there’s a handful of photos that I’ve been waiting to post, but couldn’t for this reason. Today’s is the first of that batch.

This was taken in October 2007 in my front yard. The photo is a long shadow of my youngest daughter, who is holding out her skirt for maximum dramatic effect. I tweaked the levels and cropped out her legs, just to the point of her feet. For extra-super-mega dramatic effect, I flipped the canvas 180 degrees. Yes, this photo is upside-down. Neato, huh? You’ve got to click the image and view the larger size to get the best view.

The Datapilot Universal Pro Kit is what I’m using now to retrieve my pictures off the phone without having to use cumbersome pix messaging. It took a few false starts to get this software running, but I’m pretty satisfied with the product. The user interface could use some work and their online knowledge base could be better, but I did have a good experience with their e-mail support. In addition to data transfer, I can also make my own ringtones! WOOO!

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