A couple of years ago, me and a couple of friends went up really early in the morning with hopes to catch the sunrise with our cameras. It turned out to be one of the foggiest mornings I’ve ever experienced. So not much sunrise there.
But I think it was all good. Fog, in my opinion, is a far better friend for the photographer.
This picture was taken at Hornstulls beach in Stockholm at that morning.
An interesting version of the video for Space Oddity by David Bowie from 1969. Facebook reminded me today that I had posted it there 5 years ago today.
There is a relatively new market place for buying and selling photos called Printler. It started sometime around new years. The other day I put up two of my photos for sale there. Their slogan is (translated from Swedish) “local photographs from local photographers”.
If you want, have a look at my profile there (might be in Swedish only):
http://printler.com/sv/fotograf/1504-j-o-eriksson
The other day I was out with the camera for the first time in a long time. Lately there has been no inspiration. That is something you can’t force. I wasn’t so inspired this time either. But it was a beautiful day. Winter at its best. Walked around in the nature around where I live. Snapped a few pics. This is one of the few that I liked at least a bit.
This is a picture I took a couple of years ago in Stockholm. From what I remember it was taken with my Nikon CoolPix P-7000, which I sold years ago. Today again, I am sometimes thinking about getting me a compact camera. I liked the CoolPix. It was rather small, easy to use, and could do RAW-format (which I guess many compacts can do today).
A couple of days ago at Hamngatan in Stockholm. It was late afternoon. The sun was about to set. I took out my phone and took this picture. Also edited on my phone with the Enlight App for iOS.
It had been a while since I have done any photography. The inspiration has been absent for a while. And still is. But that’s ok. It comes back when it does. No need to force it.
As a hobby photographer I often think about the possibility to do all editing and organization of my pictures on my iDevices. To be able to live without the MacBook and just have my iPad and iPhone. For me there is still not the right apps and power in those iDevices to make the switch completely. I am still dependent on Lightroom and Photoshop and their versions on OSX. There I can also use my beloved plugins from (previously) Nik Software (now owned by Google).
When it comes to organizing pictures I still haven’t come close to find anything. My picture library is kind of a mess. But when it comes to editing I think technology will soon be there. I know there is Lightroom for IOS. But that version is still far from the desktop version in my opinion. With the new powerful iPad Pro, I think it will not be long until we get an almost similar version of Lightroom on iOS as we have on OSX. The current Lightroom for iOS is for me a bit awkward to do my editing in. I feel a bit out of control when using it.
One app that I’ve been using for a long time now, and that I think takes a big step forward in editing photos on iOS, is Enlight from Lighttricks Ltd I find it easy to use, it has a clear workflow if you want to follow it, and some good editing tools. It is available for both iPhone and iPad.
Enlight’s sidebar: collapsed to the left, and expanded image category to the right
It has a sidebar on the right with 8 editing categories. The order of the categories could be seen as a good workflow to follow. The first – Canvas – is all about cropping, rotating, skewing the picture. A good place to start if any of those operations is needed. It continues with the Image category where you can do editing like brightness, contrast, sharpness, shadows and highlights etc. You can start with one of the many presets provided, where you also can set the intensity of the preset. Pressing to tools button in the bottom of the screen reveals a number of tools to do a more detailed editing of the picture.
In the beginning I had a hard time finding the different tools, like brightness, sharpness and so on. But after a while I realized they are quite logically placed.
Of course you don’t have to use each category in the workflow when editing your picture. But I found myself often using the Image section’s adjust and clarity tools. Sometimes it’s enough to just use one of the presets for those tools. Other times I adjust the intensity of them or use more detailed editing by pressing the tools button. It gives me good options whether I need to just to some light editing or if I need to do some more heavy editing. Enlight’s interface makes it easy to work with the pictures in my opinion, and it feels like I am in control of what I am doing unlike many other apps I’ve tried.
Examples of Enlight’s presets to the left. To the right some of the tools revealed after pressing the tools button.
One feature that I haven’t tried so much yet is the possibility to save you editing session and come back later to finish it. It can be found in the top toolbar of the app if pressing the share icon. The Share Toolbar also lets you share multiple photos at once.
The app has a built-in tour to get started quickly. And recently they also added a couple of tutorials for doing for example “Dramatic Portrait” and “Double Exposure”.
Enlight has a lot of tools in the app. More than I will cover in this post. But what I found is that, besides being easy to use and with a number of powerful tools, the editing gives a good quality and doesn’t “destroy” the image. Besides some very basic editing in iOS’s built in Picture App, this is the app I keep coming back to to do my editing. I’ve been using it for some time now, and it is one of my favorite apps of 2015
Get it from the App Store here:
Enlight av Lightricks Ltd.
Previous Post in this series:
2015 Favorite Apps: Part 1 Unread
2015 Favorite Apps: Part 2 1Password
This is an app that I’ve been using almost since it was born. 1Password is a Password manager, but it is more than that. It is for example also Secure Wallet where you can store Your credit card information for easy access when, for example, makin online purchases.
It has a strong password generator where you can customize the size and ingredients of the generated password. Good to have when creating new logins.
With 1Password you can also organize you logins with folders, and mark often used logins as favorites for quick access in the favorite list. It also has a built in browser which opens and logs in if you tap one of the logins in your 1Password vault. I very seldom use the built-in browser myself. Instead I use the more cumbersome workflow of opening 1Password and copying/pasting the passwords into Safari for some reason.
If you’re using 1Password on multiple devices you can easily sync the vault between them via iCloud, Dropbox or Wifi. The app is also available for Mac OSX, Windows and Android.
Recently it is also available for the Apple Watch. A feature I personally haven’t yet found any use for in how I use 1Password currently. It feels like it’s as easy to open the app on my iPhone (which I always have with me) and get the info I want from there. I can imagine that it could be of more use if using secure notes or one time passwords for two factor verification.
Besides all the above, I see that more and more apps in the App Store has built in integration with 1Password so you can use it to login within the app itself.
I admit I haven’t tried many other password managers, but I am very pleased with 1Password. It gets the job done. I always have it at hand via the iPhone, iPad, MacBook or Apple Watch (should I want to). And it makes it possible to have many different strong passwords that I do not have to remember. I only have to remember the master password to the vault and/or use Touch ID to login to the app. It has a lot of more features than I use on a daily basis. You can read up on more details on their website.
Get it from the App Store here:
1Password – Password Manager and Secure Wallet av AgileBits Inc.
Previous Post in this series
It’s that time of year again when we usually look back at the year that’s almost gone.
One thing that has been interesting me is all the apps that are available for our smart devices. As I run only Apple devices, it has been apps from the Apple Store. I love to try out different apps. Many times I use them just a day or two and then forget them as I find something new, or the app wasn’t that useful in the long run. There are a couple of apps though that I’ve kept using over the time. In this post, and a couple of upcoming posts, I wanted to list the ones I liked the most, which I found most useful or fun, and that are used mostly on a daily basis.
The first one I want to mention is Unread. Unread is a RSS reader which I use most every day, many times a day, to catch up on different blogs and news. During the years I have used a whole lot of different RSS readers on different OS. I’ve had many favorites, but this one has really stuck on me and works as I want an RSS reader to work. Also I find it very nicely designed which at least for me is very important.
In each feed it gives a nice minimalistic overview of the articles together with an excerpt of the article text. It uses intuitive gestures for navigating between different views. A good readability view when viewing an article in Unread. And uses Safari View Controller if you need to go out of the readability view to a web view.
Unread requires one of many supported RSS syncing services like Feedly (which I am using), Feed Wrangler, and FeedBin etc.
Get it from the App Store here:
Just trying out a workflow in Editorial on my iPad to post to this blog via email. It is written with some markdown and some HTML codes to see how that works. Would be good to have the option to make mailed in posts as drafts by default.
The picture below I had to add manually afterwards in Squarespace though.
J-O Eriksson 