The Phoblographer

Kodak has been in the news quite a bit recently. Besides, declaring that they are out of the camera industry, they’ve also been under lots of pressure to change and restructure. Because of this, we’ve known them for one thing for many years: film. I personally have been a lover of their film for years, and shed a tear like many of you the day that Kodachrome died. Further, I’m also a lover of Portra: having using it with some Zeiss lenses recently, during professional shoots, and even Gevon loves it.

Like many of you, I dread the day that they kill Tri-x: especially with the look it gives off with medium format cameras.

Kodak now often states that Ektachrome is the closest thing to Kodachrome that they have. And while that all depends on who you ask, one can’t deny that the film is indeed quite beautiful. Even though digital may come close, I still personally feel that it can’t totally capture the full look.

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Not long ago, we did a quick hands on review of the beta version of CameraBag 2. Today the company has announced that they are releasing the entire version. CameraBag 2 is a piece of software for Mac and PC that lets the user apply loads and loads of those amazing Instagram-like filters to their images (both RAW and JPEGs.) Additionally, it offers a totally different interface that Lightroom 3 and 4 do while still allowing the user to do quite a bit of the manipulations that those programs offer. It does all this while still remaining non-destructive in the editing process.

For the person that doesn’t want to take the plunge into Lightroom yet, you can surely consider CameraBag 2. However, don’t consider it a replacement for Lightroom or Photoshop.

CameraBag 2 is available now for Mac and PC. A single cross-platform license is available at www.nevercenter.com for $29 (launch sale price: $24), and a Mac-only version is available via the Mac App Store for $24 (launch sale price: $19). A free, fully-functional 30-day demo is included in the download from www.nevercenter.com, where more info, tutorials, and videos can also be found.

I’ve been using the final release for around a week now and will have a full review coming soon.

Camera Bag is an editing software program primarily centered around the use of presets with levels of adjustment: similar to the way that many mobile phone applications like Instagram work. While Adobe Lightroom 3 and Photoshop all have presets that allow users to get images with a cross-processed, plastic camera type of look (amongst others) not many people still know how to accomplish these look or understand color theory.

So does Camera Bag worth your time?

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Image from This is My Next’s Liveblog of the Apple Announcement, by far the fastest and best one that didn’t crash.

Today, Apple announced the iPhone 4S. In the world of photography, we mostly care about the camera to help spur on our creative initiatives. The iPhone 4 had an impressive range of features like an f2.4 lens, ISO 80-2000 and 1/1000th shutter speeds. Indeed, after our field test we saw that use of Apple’s iPhone 4 really took off with the amount of apps that came out such as Hisptamatic, Instagram, etc.

Apple proclaimed that they wanted to create a camera that is better than a point and shoot. So, have they? Without having our hands on the product at all, we’re going to do a breakdown the specs.

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Sometimes we don’t want to bring a point and shoot, mirrorless camera, film camera, or DSLR with us. And at those times, we’ve often been good enough with the results from our phones. Indeed, when we tested the Apple iPhone 4′s camera, it performed very well. While the iPhone users have their fun with Instagram and Hipstamatic, the closest thing that us Android users have had is Retro Camera (which has undergone many changes since our review.) Enter Pixlr-O-Matic for Android: hands down the single app that is killing my battery due to my absolute addiction.

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