Create Great iPhone Photos: Apps, Tips, Tricks, and Effects [Book Review]

April 18, 2011 @ 1:04PM

Create Great iPhone Photos: Apps, Tips, Tricks, and Effects [Book Review]

By Damien Franco

Create Great iPhone Photos: Apps, Tips, Tricks, and Effects [Amazon] by Allan Hoffman, No Starch Press; 1 edition (February 4, 2011)

Creat Great iPhone Photos by Allan Hoffman

About the Book

You own the world's most versatile, customizable camera: your iPhone. Out of the box, your iPhone camera is no-frills, but you can transform it into a digital darkroom, photo editing suite, and photoblogging tool all rolled into one . . . if you know how to use it.

Create Great iPhone Photos shows you how to take great iPhone photographs—and even turn your not-so-hot photos into thrillingly inventive, atmospheric images. Author and iPhone photographer Allan Hoffman shows you how to harness the full potential of your iPhone's camera and turn it into a wildly fun tool for photographic creativity. You'll learn tips and tricks for generating effects, applying filters, and manipulating your images with wonderfully innovative apps—all right on your iPhone. And you'll be inspired by interviews with today's top iPhone photographers and galleries of their impressive work.

You'll also learn how to:

Produce stunning panoramas, vintage-style photobooth strips, and super-saturated Polaroid® photos with a hip, 1970s look
Unlock the secret power of your iPhone's camera with burst mode, high dynamic range (HDR) effects, exposure and focus controls, and more
Find and install the best iPhone apps for cropping images, adjusting contrast and exposure, and editing your photos to achieve eye-popping results
Publish and share images right from your iPhone, without the hassle of memory cards, cables, or complex desktop photo editing tools

You have Photoshop® (and a lot, lot more) right in your pocket. Do amazing things with your photos with Create Great iPhone Photos.

About the Author

For the past fifteen years, Allan Hoffman has been the technology columnist for The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest daily newspaper, where he writes about Internet culture and trends, the iPhone, and digital photography. His work has appeared in Newsday, the New York Times, Wired.com, and many other magazines and newspapers. He maintains a photoblog at whatiseenow.com and spent much of his teenage years in his high school's darkroom.

iPhone Photography Book Review

Allan Hoffman has put together an easy to read and easy to understand book on the iPhone camera, the apps, and a basic "how to" geared at photographers who want to get the most out of their mobile device.

More and more photographers are ditching their compact digital cameras for the iPhone because it has so much to offer in terms of picture taking, editing, and sharing. There are tons of apps that will aid anyone using an iPhone as camera and, to be honest, it can be a little daunting trying to navigate all of those photography apps. That's where this book really excels. More than just an intro to iPhone photography this book also serves as a guide to some of the best iOS photography apps on the market today.

Hoffman does well by categorizing the apps in their main function and explaining the whys, as well as the hows, on all of the apps in the book.

I'm sure many of the more advanced iPhone photo-enthusiasts would find this book lacking in depth. That's okay. It's not really geared for the iPhone photographer who already has 10 or more photography apps and uses their iPhone camera on a daily (or more often) basis.

Conclusion

A "getting started" guide on the iPhone camera and an intro to the various photography apps was probably needed. The tips and tricks offered by the author should aid any budding iPhoneographer in getting the most out of that mobile device as camera. By covering some of the most popular photography apps for the iPhone camera Hoffman has put together a book that works as a guide for the iPhone photography beginner. He does this very well with a casual writing style that's as fresh as the technology he covers.