Year: 2011

Shelf Life, Episode #467 – starring BEN GAY

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I discovered Ben on a packet of pain medicine at Walgreen’s. Him and his mate (also called Ben Gay) could have the most amazing conversations I thought. Then I discovered Halftone which turns photos into stylised images and let’s you add speech bubbles and captions. There are several apps that do this – let’s see …

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Harinezumi in my Hand

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I wanted to use the original picture as a product shot for my Harinezumi review but I felt it didn’t look quite right. However this morning I found an app called Pencil vs Camera which turns your pictures into pencil sketches – and it does a really good job at it. As an added gimmick …

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Palm Tree

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I shot this on Harinezumi in Miami, it was originally a blurred shot of a Palm Tree in macro mode. It works great as a desktop background (see below). I took it into Sketchbook Express to have a fiddle and I loved playing with it so much that I decided to upgrade to the Pro …

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Bench Sketch

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This was originally an Instagram picture by Rick Stillwell. I loved it and thought this would make for some great pencil drawing practice in SketchBook Pro. See Rick’s fabulous original picture here.

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Every Man, Woman and Child

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Ever since I tried Art Acedemy for Nintendo DS I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a tool like that with a bigger screen and more drawing controls? Like the professionals have? Like a Wacom Tablet with a built-in screen? It appears to have arrived as an app for the iPad – and it’s …

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My personal Harinezumi 2+++ Review

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A few months ago I took a wander around town with my friend Andy Toms, and we happened upon the temporary Photographer’s Gallery not far from Warren Street.

Spontaneous as I am I spent a rather shocking amount of money on a tiny little plastic camera called The Digital Harinezumi 2+++

This little piece of cheap engineering is a 3MP digital camera that’s meant to take “bad” pictures and apply off-the-wall lo-fi effects on the fly. Anything from harsh black and white to over-saturated colours is what you get for £140. Did I mention it does video too?

I’ve fallen in love with it and due to its small size keep carrying it almost everywhere I go. I haven’t experienced the willingness to take digital pictures with any other digital camera. In fact, Zumi feels and behaves like a plastic film camera!

Now that I’ve spent some time with her I can show you some funky results and talk you through the ins and outs of my first every digital plastic camera.

Most images on this page are shot using the Vivid 1 setting - just like this one. No processing was done, all pictures are straight from the camera.

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Half Spoon Sugar

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Even though this packet of sugar claims it’s OK for another two years at least, it has “Made in 1965” written all over it. I took this picture with the iPad camera in bright sunlight and then added a Rich Lauren effect via Classic Toy. I liked it so much that I did it AGAIN …

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The Message in a Watermelon and Sunglasses

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I’ve shot some video with my Harinezumi camera when we were in Miami a few weeks ago, and I finally got round to editing it. Julia even dusted off my old electric piano so I could give it a personal soundtrack too.

This video has a bit of a story which I’ll explain below – it has to do with a watermelon I found one morning at the beach. It was battling against the tide so I stepped out and rescued it.

Turns out it there was a MESSAGE inside…

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iPad – WiFi tethered vs native 3G Connection Test

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When I first bout my iPad I went for the cheap and cheerful approach: Who needs 3G when you have an unlimited data plan on your phone?

You can use a tethering app to create a WiFi Hotspot everywhere and use your WiFi iPad at much lower cost than shilling out on the extra 3G functionality and a separate data plan.

Those were my thoughts. Within the first week I was already missing the 3G I’ve come to love from my Kindle: mental freedom, access the web anywhere I am, from a park bench to a train. Still, I had my trusty Nokia N900 phone and the Joiku Hotspot app to make it work in theory.

There are however practical issues I hadn’t anticipated like very limited battery life on my phone and much lower connection speeds. Consequently I’ve upgraded to the 3G version and in hindsight wish I had bought that one in the first place.

In this article I’ll show you some tests that compare the connection speed between my tethered connection and the built in 3G connection. The results are surprising!

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Fake Polaroid Portrait

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I’ve shot this with the Retro Cam app, consequently used to yearbook myself (see previous post). I find it remarkable to see how much this picture looks like an actual Polaroid: look at the sightly discoloured edges around the picture, this is what happens when the developer paste can’t squeeze underneath the white foil. It’s …

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I’ve yearbooked myself

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My colleagues at MTV have shown me this app over a year ago and I just remembered it. Now that I’m on the iSide I can finally start exploring all the crazy goodies people have been talking about for years.

This venture started with a picture I took on the iPad using Retro Camera, and app that I’ll talk about in detail another time. It just happened to be in my camera roll, so I used it in Yearbookyourself.

You can adjust the rotation and contrast of the picture and preview it live, tweaking until you’re happy. How many people’s yearbooks have they been through I wonder? And what do the people think whose faces have been photoshopped out?

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Woody with Sprockets

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Here’s a picture of Woody with his pink scarf. We discovered the Urbian Retro Cam app yesterday – I particularly love the sprockets it puts in the picture, you get this when you shoot in Pinhole mode.

Chocolate Bar Title FAIL #snickers

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Some of the Snickers bars in Walgreen’s had this writing on them. Brings back memories of when it was called Marathon in the UK.

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Two weeks without glasses

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I went for an eye exam last week at Vision Excess in Wood Green. Turns out my prescription was too strong so I needed a new pair. In fact, I wanted to keep the frame and just have the lenses replaced.

This leaves me with my old glasses (which were too string before I got the ones that are now also too strong) so it’s royally screwing with my head.

Unless I just don’t wear glasses for a while – which is what I’m doing, and I gotta tellya: I’m enjoying the side effects!

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Art Deco, Harinezumi and Photoshop Express

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Fascinating stuff: on my journey back from MiamiBeach a couple of weeks ago I played with some of the apps on my iPad.

I had already invested into the camera connection kit and imported several photos from my Harinezumi’s memory card not the iPad. Then I had a play in Adobe’s free Photoshop Express App and was amazed by then results.

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