As part of my work for unit A2 I recently completed the Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles Questionnaire to determine what my learning style is.

The style that came out the strongest for me was Pragmatist, described on the questionnaire I completed as

A preference here indicates an orientation towards relevance between subject matter and one's own position. "If it works, it's good" is the motto, and they look for the earliest opportunity to implement what has been offered. They are practical, down-to-earth individuals who enjoy problem solving and making practical decisions. The focus is very strongly on implementation and output.

The sentence "They are practical, down-to-earth individuals who enjoy problem solving and making practical decisions" seems to describe me pretty well, so I guess it is in the right area. Now I just need to work out how to apply this.

Over Christmas I adopted Richard's old iPhone. He'd upgraded to a nice shiny iPhone 3GS, and his old 1st generation iPhone was sitting around doing nothing, so I thought I should give it a reason to live. That, and the fact that my trusty Nokia Navigator 6110 was on its last legs.

I only got my hands on it the day before we flew off on our holidays, so I added a few applications that I already had on my iPod touch, and bought a few photography applications that Richard already had and found useful, or that I'd seen impressive reviews/results from. I also took pot look and bought one that I just stumbled upon.

One of my uses for the iPhone within photography so far has been for updates to flickr/twitpic/email on the go - using wifi where I found it I managed to upload 104 photos whilst we were away keeping friends and family in touch with our progress. I almost always have a backlog of proper photos (by which I mean taken on either my d80, or on one of my, ever expanding, family of film cameras). So, processing as I go is important to enable these to be shared quickly.

Applications

I have 3 types of photography applications on my iPhone.

• Applications for sharing
• Cameras
• Processing

Applications for Sharing
I only have the one application in this category - flickr. It allows me to look at my photos and those of my friends, to access my favourites, to edit the details of my photos and, most importantly, to upload my photos at full resolution adding tags and sets as I go. Whilst we were away I used email to upload photos to flickr as I could queue them up, so that next time I found a wifi connection they'd just go, however this only emails a smaller version of the image. Being back at home where data roaming is cheap (if not a bit slow), using this application is my preferred upload method.

Camera
I have 2 camera applications in addition to the standard one, NightCamera and Hipstamatic.
NightCamera is my first choice whenever I'm lacking in natural light - so, early mornings out with the dog, indoors, night time.
Hipstamatic is a new purchase, so I haven't had a chance to work out when I'm going to use this application yet, so I'll probably revisit this in an additional post sometime. Up until now I've liked taking the photos on a "normal" camera application and applying filters afterwards - this is a change as I'll have to get it right first time.
The standard iPhone camera isn't the best camera in the world, but it is adequate in most situations. The thing that makes the photos more usable, at least for me, is the ability to use different applications to achieve different effects.

Processing
This is where the iPhone comes into its own for photography. My rules are that everything taken on the iPhone must be processed on the iPhone and uploaded from the iPhone. No post processing on my laptop (as I mentioned earlier, I've got enough of a backlog already). So, the ability to do some element of processing is important. I have 4 applications that fall into this category.
The 4 applications are, in no particular order, ShakeItPhoto, CameraBag, MillColour or Adobe Photoshop Mobile.
ShakeItPhoto tends to get used for photos which are primarily signs, or bright expanses of colour.
CameraBag and MillColour tend to get used for images which are more landscape or people related, or which I'm trying to make a bit arty.
Adobe Photoshop Mobile tends to get used to put borders on things, and sometimes to do the nice blur effect.
In all cases, I'm using the pre-defined filters, rather than adjusting individual levels. I don't find the representation and resolution on the iPhone screen to be quite sufficient for fine adjustments, so I'm happy to default to a more pre-defined effect.

I'm still looking for an application which allows for custom rotation - i.e. correcting a slightly wonky horizon. If you know of one, please let me know.

Sample Photos

Standard Camera + ShakeItPhoto

Standard Camera + CameraBag

Standard Camera + Mill Colour

Night Camera + ShakeItPhoto

Night Camera + Camera Bag

Night Camera + Mill Colour

Night Camera + Adobe Photoshop Mobile

Hipstamatic

A quick NVQ update:

Yesterday I met with my assessor for the first time this year, and we reviewed my progress. It looks like I'm very close to having everything in place for my first 2 units - D1 and D6. My evidence for both of these units is now with the assessor to catalogue and cross reference and bring back for me to append any notes and signatures that she thinks the Internal Verifier will want to see. That leaves me with 5 to go, and a target date of August which feels a bit on the ambitious side.

Next up is Unit A2: Manage your own resources and professional development and I have quite a lot of evidence, personal statements and the like to produce before my next meeting on the 18th February so the pace has definitely just been upped.

Ladder in the light
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

In January I uploaded 126 photos.

I know I posted this image just the other day, but I think it has to be my favourite for January. I like the darkness leading you into the image. I like the simplicity of the subject. I'm surprised by the quality of image I managed to wrangle out of my iPhone using just the night camera application, the mill colour application and the adobe photoshop mobile application.

This photo has also got me thinking a lot about the style of photographs I like - and black and white minimalist photos are ranking pretty high and consequently I have been enjoying looking through the Minimal Black&White flickr pool.

PhotographyBlog pointed me at PhotographyBB the other day. This is primarily an online magazine, producing a free PDF version monthly. I downloaded the most recent one, popped it on my iPhone, and have been reading articles in it over the past few days.

In general, I haven't really been a big fan of PDF magazines, because I've never really found a good way to read them. However, the iPhone works really well when combined with a 3rd party app - Felaur PDF - and it has been a pleasure.

The magazine is well put together, and informative. I especially enjoyed the book review of Hollywood Portraits: Classic Shots and How to Take Them and the suggestion to take a look at Larry “Darkman” Clark Darkmans Darkroom and especially the photographs that Larry has taken using the styles from the book.

I've subscribed to the PhotographyBB RSS feed and will be using it to ensure I don't miss another edition.

Ladder in the light
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

It was taken on a 1st generaton iPhone through the NightCamera app, and then processed using the Noir filter in Mill Colour before having a border added in Photoshop mobile

Feet
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

In December I uploaded 176 photos.

This photo is of Richard's feet, on the steps to a subway in Hong Kong.

This photo was taken with the iPhone camera, and was part of the collection of images that I uploaded whilst on my travels - there are 1709 photos to work through taken with the D80 (so they may be under consideration for many months to come). The photo was processed on the phone using the ShakeItPhoto app, which at 59p is a bargain.

I have chosen this photo because I like the composition and colours after ShakeItPhoto has done its magic, and it reminds me of being in Hong Kong