A few weeks ago I briefly mentioned hipstamatic and said I'd come back to it. Well, here I am and I have to say I love this application. It makes iPhone photography so much fun. The interface is lovely, especially changing the lens (see this video for an idea, but do turn the sound down - the song is frightful) and the upload to flickr feature (new to version 150) works really nicely, even doing some basic tagging for me.

My original concerns were, as I posted last time:

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.

Getting it right first time is no bad thing to get used to, and it goes along with my recent thoughts about creativity through limitations. I am trying to get into the habit of visualising the resulting image first, and then taking the photo, and given the time that the app needs to develop the image this is a good habit to get in to. I'm still definitely practicing this technique, but I'm hopeful that the improvements will be visible across any medium I photograph in - whether I'm using an iPhone, a DSLR, Mum's old Balda Baldiexette or any of the other film cameras which I own.

I do still use the normal iPhone camera sometimes, and if I'm indoors, or its dark, then I'll use night camera almost exclusively and combine it with one of the editing packages I mentioned last time (still exclusively on the iPhone though). I've enjoyed getting familiar with the different lens and film options (and I've bought all the hipstapaks), but definitely have a preference (at least at the moment) for the John S lens which I love for its vibrant colours and mottled age effect.

The photo above is my most interesting hipstamatic photo (according to the flickr interesting algorithm) but feel free to take a look at the rest of my hipstamatic photos on flickr.

Some additional sample photos:

In February I uploaded 247 photos.

This photo was taken at Paddington Reservoir, Paddington, Sydney. It was taken on my Nikon d80, and processed using Lightroom where I converted it to black and white.

The reason I've chosen this as my favourite photo of the month is because I love the sense of depth. The pattern of the fence in the foreground crosses with the pattern of the steps in the background. The graffiti on the wall gives another set of patterns.

Jono took us to Paddington, originally because we wanted to go to the Blender gallery. On this day the gallery was shut as it was still the Christmas period - we did later go and visit. Instead we strolled around Paddington, and I found the old reservoir to be an excellent location for photography. Well recommended if you have some spare time, and your camera.

Spotted via the AmazingPics tweet

I love the crispness of the end shot with the beautiful, almost cloudlike, flow of the ballerina from left to right.

Life in LoFi mentioned a competition for the best photo taken using the hipstamatic iPhone app. The prize is

for a chance to be one of three featured iPhoneographers on iPhoneography.org

I've been enjoying using hipstamatic, and so thought I'd submit my image and see if anything comes of it. You can always help me out by heading over and voting for me :-) (although I think you need to have an account to do so)

This morning I took the dog out for a walk and was struck by the quality of the light. Golden light shone off all the buildings, and everything looked clean.

This photo was taken at around 7:20am (the EXIF says 1pm or so but that is when it was uploaded via the iPhone flickr app), a time when even just a week ago the sun wouldn't have risen. In fact, the sun apparently only rose at 7:13am today, so this truly was the golden hour.

It was a beautiful time to be out and about on the Brighton seafront and the recently restored bandstand stood out against the still blue sea and the blue sky looking magnificent.

Alex and I were discussing creativity the other day and discussing if limitiations (self-imposed or otherwise) enhanced creativity or not. We decided that it could do. We weren't specifically talking about photography, but that is how I've chosen to apply it.

Today as I was walking the dog I spotted this hat on a post and thought it would make a great photo. I had 3 photo taking tools with me - a Pentax PC-33, an Olympus AM-100 and my iPhone. I decided to use the iPhone and to visualise what I wanted from the photo before deciding which application to use. I knew that I wanted to emphasize the colour of the hat, and I wanted to draw the green on the hat into the green of the field. I took 2 photos using the standard iPhone camera (one of them was later used to produce this black and white version which looks poor in comparison to this one) and then decided to use hipstamatic. I'm still getting to grips with this application and haven't completely got it clear in my head about which lens and film combinations give the look I'm after, and the process of changing lenses and films in the application slows down the process quite a bit which gives time to consider and compose (a practice that normal digital photography has taken away from me a bit). I did remember though that earlier in the week the John S lens had given some really vibrant colours and a great vignette. This came pretty close to what I was aiming for, and what I saw in my minds eye.

I'm currently trying to think of a couple of personal photography projects to work on, and I think one of them may be to do with composition, and getting more photos to match the picture that I visualise.