As with my review of the eyemodule, this review was originally on the janeandrichard site and dates from early 2001.

The Review

During our trip to the Maldives, we used underwater disposable cameras to take photos of fishes. These came out reasonably well, but weren't of wonderful quality. So, we decided to invest in a proper underwater camera. We'd also been carrying a small panoramic camera around with us, which again didn't produce all that good quality images. So, an APS camera appeared to be the ideal solution. Ironically, we haven't had the opportunity to take it snorkelling since.

We bought the Weathermatic camera at Heathrow Airport as we left the UK for a long weekend in Iceland. It was the only waterproof APS camera we could find at the time. Although for the trip to Iceland we didn't need a waterproof camera, one that was weatherproof and didn't object to being dropped in the snow was a good idea.

The photos it produces are of a pretty high standard, and we've had no problems with it in the 2 years we've had the camera.

The specification claims that it can go underwater to a depth of around 10 metres (we've taken it down in swimming pools, and lakes and things to 3 or so metres and it has been okay).

The controls are designed to be easy to use underwater, and this also makes them quite easy to use with gloved hands. Of course, this makes the camera quite bulky (and also, being bright yellow it isn't subtle).

We're in no rush to replace this camera, and it is used as our main camera for all events.

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 luck 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

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.

One day last week we had a conversation in the office about how one of the team felt he could only read bulleted lists these days, or articles/posts which told him how many things he'd have to read - i.e. The 5 best laptops, the top 3 SQL keywords etc. I thought this was ridiculous.

Google Reader and Instapaper are my online reading tools of choice. I use Google Reader to keep an eye on a lot of feeds, feeds about development, photography, leadership, dogs etc.

I've noticed recently that there are some feeds I only read on a desktop/laptop - these are feeds which contain items I may wish to action (like upcoming event notifications which I may want to attend or tag) or which contain a series of links (like The Morning Brew). These don't get attended to in my mobile versions as it's just too hard - instead they linger around until next time I open google reader on a laptop/desktop. In an ideal world I'd be able to set a preference somewhere that allowed me to mark different feeds as being displayed on different hardware or even simpler according to a filter I'd set up.

Some other feeds will be briefly skimmed through before the posts I value as interesting are saved to Instapaper so that I can read them properly, and at my leisure at a later time (the Instapaper iPhone/iPod touch app works really well for this)

Still others are consumed within google reader - these are mainly photography related, such as my flickr contacts photos, some visualisation feeds. Basically items which are image rich and again, don't require much attention.

I downloaded an online-only iPhone/iPod touch RSS reader app (named RSS) a few weeks ago which is linked to my google account. This comes complete with an Add to Instapaper link making my process even easier and saves me having to do battle with mobile Google Reader (at least 2 clicks needed to get to the proper HTML page for Adding to Instapaper).

So, having actually stopped and thought about it for a while, I'm not really any different - a lot of content is skim read with only a small percentage making it into my real, studied, reading list. And even making it on to Instapaper doesn't guarantee that it still looks interesting enough to actually read. My attention window is definitely shrinking, but you'll almost certainly never know this because there are no bullet point lists or top x hints here and you'll have moved on long ago :-)

The Review

One of the attractions of the Handspring Visor, has to be the springboard modules. What a totally neat idea. The first modules released though, weren't really that interesting to me. The eyemodule on the other hand, was a really cool concept.

So, I own one of the original eyemodule cameras (there are two kinds now). It's very small, and adds very little size or weight to the Visor. The images it takes are pretty good for something so small, but you're not going to want to throw away your proper camera and rely on this.

It loves bright light conditions. If you would consider using a flash on your normal camera, don't even try with the eyemodule. The images may look okay on the screen, but they'll probably turn out speckly. But, in the right conditions, it works well, and can produce some great pictures.

The original eyemodule cameras can take three formats of pictures, small black and white - 120 x 160 pixels, large black and white - 240 x 320 and large colour - 240 x 320. The small black and white ones take about 9k of memory, the large black and white ones take around 40K and the colour ones around 180k. So, you can fit quite a lot of pictures into an 8MB visor. When we were on holiday in New Zealand, I had around 250 pictures in there, mostly little black and whites, but with 10 or so colour ones too.

The eyemodule 2 cameras can take short video clips too, these use up more memory obviously, and if using a colour visor then the film will be colour, otherwise it'll be black and white (sounds strange, but that's how it seems to be).

So, will I be trading my eyemodule 1 in for a 2? Not yet. I'm happy with the camera I have, and maybe the 3 will be even cooler.

Looking back
This was my first digital camera, and I replaced it with a Canon S20 when the eyemodule, along with various other toys (and my bag) was stolen. As part of the clean up operation my eyemodule photos have moved on to flickr. It is quite strange reading what I wrote about it producing some great pictures when now I'm used to a much higher standard of digital imagery. It is also quite amusing (to me) to see what I took photos of - the building of Richard's Dad's shed, toys in the office, and lots of people - none of which I would have taken film based photographs of at that time, so I guess it recorded 6 months of my life which would have otherwise gone (mainly) unphotographed.

This is the toy that gave me an interest in digital photography, and I remember enjoying using it very much, and being delighted with how it worked and what it could do and I've enjoyed revisiting those images whilst moving them over to flickr. I've also spotted that there is an eyemodule-related group there too - so I may have to submit a couple of images to it. I'm delighted to see that the eyebrowse gallery still exists too.

So, sample photographs:

More photos can be found on my flickr stream under the tag eyemodule

Today is World Toy Camera day, and so I thought it was only right and proper that I took the opportunity to blog a quick review of my Aryca Autosampler.

This camera was a Christmas present last year after many years of me hankering after one or other of the mutli-lens cameras. I asked for this one for one main reason, the ability to select which of many different modes to shoot in. This makes it mimic the possibilities of both the lomography pop and the actionsampler.

The Aryca Autosampler has 4 lenses, arranged in a 2 x 2 square.
There are 7 different modes to choose from. They are selected using the button with a person on it on the top of the unit. This allows you to select

• to fire each lens separately, effectively getting four times as many shots out of your film
• to fire the two horizontal lenses together, effectively getting twice as many shots out of your film
• to fire all the lenses at once
• to fire the lenses one after another at a slow speed - this fires the shots in the following order (when looking at a print) - top left, top right, bottom right, bottom left
• to fire the lenses one after another at a medium speed
• to fire the lenses one after another at a high speed

It has a built in flash with 4 modes (auto, flash-on, flash-off, night scene) - set using the button marked M on the top of the unit
It comes with a removable waterproof casing (although I've haven't tried this yet)
It takes 35mm film
It has no focussing modes/zones, but starts focussing at around 1.5m
It needs 2 AA batteries
It has a focal length of around 30mm
It has a self timer set to around 10 seconds

I use the camera mainly on sequence mode 3 (the slowest) as it works the best (in my experience) for capturing the movement of people and small animals (ok, mostly a small dog). I've found it to work really well for snowboarding, and other action based photography were you have a good idea of where the action is going to happen next. It doesn't get a lot of use, but will definitely be accompanying me on my next snowboard adventure, probably filled with either Kodak Ektar or Koda Portra VC film and is best filed under fun

Some sample photos:

More photos can be found on my flickr stream under the tag autosampler

About a year ago now, I tweeted

Looking for a mind mapping application for the iPhone or iPod Touch - any recommendations?

A friend of mine mentioned iBlueSky and after a look at the website I bought it. At the time I was planning a couple of Madgex ILP talks, and wanted to try out mind-mapping as a way of organising my thoughts.

One year one and I'm making a lot of use of iBlueSky again as part of my NVQ work. So, the time has come to finally review the app for others who may be looking for an iPhone/iPod Touch mind-mapping app.

How do I use it?

I use iBlueSky mainly for idea capture, I like that I can jot down ideas when I get a spare few minutes. It doesn't seem to take long for me to lose myself in the problem domain and add new thoughts. As I mentioned above, I've been making a lot of use of it for my NVQ work, and just the research for Unit D1 has resulted in 3 or 4 mind maps.

Getting started

The first page you're going to be presented with is a list of projects. Clicking on any one of these will open the project for editing. The order can be changed via the Settings application - allowing you to order them manually, by created date or by last modified date (which is what I've chosen to use)

Getting maps in and out

One of the more recent additions to iBlueSky is the ability to import mind-maps. As mentioned on their website, as of version 2.0, released in June

iBlueSky now imports and exports in Novamind, OPML and Freemind formats.

Exports are handled via email, and are provided in PNG, PDF, MM (which works with FreeMind), text, OPML, NMIND and their own BSKY format. You don't chose a format, when you do email the project, all formats get created and appended to the email.

There is also an option to backup all of the projects - this uses Box.Net, a website for sharing files, which comes with a limited free version. All projects are stored in a folder called iBlueSky in the files area. These projects are stored as BSKY format, which are importable via the import function.

How does it work?

I've found the app to be really conducive to getting ideas into a usable format. I start off with a node with the name of the idea/project/task, and start from there. Each branch created off that main node will have a different colour. The colours can be changed if so required.

Branches can be cut or copied and so can be moved around if ideas are found to be more or less related.

The orientation of the map changes according to the way that the device is held. There doesn't seem to be a way to lock the orientation, a feature which would be very useful. You can zoom in to the map, so you can see the whole map or a part of it as you feel you need.

How much?

When I bought it a year ago, I paid £4.99. It is now £1 more at £5.99. It is one of the most expensive apps I've bought, and I do go through stages when I don't use it. But, when I do need to do some mind mapping, I find it great. I tend to use it in conjunction with FreeMind now that these can be imported and so will update sometimes on the iPod Touch, and sometimes at a computer.

Anything else?

I recently had the app crash a couple of times, once when emailing, and once when just generally editing. I mentioned this on twitter, and within an hour had been responded to, given the support email address and was in conversation with Tenero as they tried to resolve my issues - most impressive.

Would I buy it again?

Yes, I sure would. The app has evolved (in a good way) over the past year, and has got some great features. It works well for me and suits what I'm trying to do.

Supporting material

The mind map for this review

So, head on over and took a look around...

I'm a recent subscriber to the Daily Photo Tips with Chris podcast, and listened to the Camera or Card Reader edition the other day and wanted to add my thoughts to it.

In addition to Chris's reason to use a card reader rather than camera to transfer images - which was primarily speed of transfer - I have a few more

• preserving the safety of my camera - having the camera tethered to my laptop by a cable adds something to get caught - resulting in a (admittedly small) risk that my camera or my laptop ends up on the floor. Well, I say it is small, but it is something that I've done which resulted in the camera having to be sent away for repair. Not something I want to repeat
• when shooting an event a card reader can be uploading photos on to a laptop whilst the camera, with a different card in it, can still be in use. Additionally, if you find yourself with an assistant, this is a job that can be delegated
• battery preservation - although my d80 battery lasts a long time, every transfer of images uses power

The final recommendation is the same, get a good USB2 card reader and use that for image transfer. In fact, as I write this, I have a SanDisk MicroMate attached to my laptop transferring images.