Here are my favourite and best iPhone photography / best instagram images .. so far.

Camera phone still cannot beat its big brothers, like the DSLR or even some of the compacts. Maybe it never will, but who knows, technology will only get better. But for now, the convenience of having a good little camera in my pocket all the time is wonderful since I cannot always be carrying the DSLR or the M9 or even the smaller Micro Four-Thirds camera, like the Olympus E-P3 or Panasonic GF-1.

Oh, by the way, thank you to those who have been asking about my mum. Thank God that she is now home, recovering well.

The mobile phone technology has advanced so much that the combination of powerful processor and many excellent photography apps has created an opportunity for us to be more creative while on the go. I just wish the iPhone battery technology will also advance so it can last for at least 12 hours of shooting before I come home and charge it. OK, minus the breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee breaks, maybe 8 hours of non stop shooting.

The following two images below touched me a lot. I saw her couple weeks back in Little India when I accompanied my cousin to shoot there. She’s easily 70+ years old and she was pushing a cart full of flattened boxes. She probably collected those unused boxes from somewhere and was going to sell them for some cash. She crossed the road to move to the other side. A car passed by, much faster than her as you can tell from the blurry image of the car. Human vs Machine. To put things in perspective, the things I complain about in my life do not seem bad at all.

Here is another one from that morning shoot in Little India. A man crossing the road on his bike. It’s black and white, but if you can tell from the position, he crossed when the red man was still on. 

The following were taken during my recent trip to Bali in December for a short family vacation. Taken mainly in Kuta. They were processed by the Instagram app and couple other iPhone apps on the iPhone itself. Beautiful Kuta sunset.

I did very little post processing to the image below. Only bumped up the contrast a little bit and cropped to square format. Amazing phone camera.

The famous war photographer, Robert Capa, once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you are not close enough.” When I saw waves crashing onto the rocks along the Kuta beach, I thought it would be cool if I could take some shots. To get the impact, I need to be close. Really close. And my newly bought iPhone 4s (it was less than a week when I brought it to Bali with me) was splashed with the salt water. Yummy. But I managed to quickly clean it up. It’s still functioning until now. Please don’t tell Apple when one day it stops working and I will go to claim the warranty. 

This one was taken in the morning. Beautiful morning. Clear blue sky and the beach chairs were just waiting for tourists to sit on them. And … can you see the moon right in the center of the top part? The full resolution image shows that very  clearly.

And this one was really a lucky shot. I was in the car when I shot this on a rainy day in Kuta. The car window was wet, lots of water droplets. I saw the couple waiting at the shelter from afar and I focused on the water droplets and took the shot when our car passed by them.

I tried to use the iPhone to shoot moving subjects. These beach boys were playing soccer. I was standing on a big rock, which you can tell from the angle of the shots.

And some more moving subjects.  The cousins.

And last one from Kuta, the model in Bali. 

Shooting moving subjects indoor with iPhone is challenging since we can’t really control the shutter speed. Hence, when shooting indoor and the light is not bright enough to give you fast shutter speed to freeze the movement, the subjects will be blurry. But I still love these images of the two little monkeys jumping on the bed. I tried to minimize the blur by “clicking” the shutter button when they were at the peak of their jump.

When shooting portrait with iPhone, try to zoom in in order to minimize the distortion. iPhone has a wide lens and shooting portrait with wide lens won’t be pleasing, especially when you are too close to the subject. So, zoom in.

Few more portrait shots. These were taken at the Universal Studios. I love the setting they have there.

I seem to be addicted to shooting from inside a car on a rainy day. These two shots of cabs were shot when I was in another cab on the highway. The wet car window caused the distortion, which I like.

You should have seen these two in my previous post, but let me post them again here, because they are my favorites too. The panorama, shot with the excellent AutoStitch app.

And last but not least, I love leaf on the ground. You guys have known that from my previous posts. So, this will continue with my iPhone.

So, that’s it for now. See you in the next batch of my favorite images taken with the iPhone. You all keep shooting !!

I posted these images of smoke photography on my Facebook page previously in 2009. I decided to post them here too now for those who are not frequent facebooker. As mentioned before, the smoke was real, but the colors were digitally modified during post processing. Enjoy.

I believe you know what they are. Red, green and yellow peppers. Cut, mixed and stacked together. I first shot this kind of image probably 7 years ago, but the file has already been archived on DVD. Back then I archived my photos on two sets of DVDs and it’s painful to do the search now. The price of hard disk 7 years ago was much higher, so I couldn’t justify to keep buying hard disk.

So, I shot this again today. Slightly different style and simpler using only available light in my living room this late afternoon. The lens was my Canon 100mm f/2.8L Macro set at f/11. I didn’t want the aperture to be smaller to avoid the effect of light diffraction that may cause the image to become softer. ISO was 100 and shutter speed was 0.6 seconds. Camera was of course mounted on tripod and shutter release cable was used. I bought three peppers, but was only able to mix and match two “new” peppers. The other one is below. Which one do you like the most?

Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made and forgot to put a soul into. ~ Henry Beecher (1813-1887)

All photos here were shot hand held and wide open at f/2.8 using my macro lens with image stabilizer and natural light coming in from the window. All were taken in a high key mode and f/2.8 was used as I wanted to only emphasize certain part of the flower. Have a great week ahead everyone.

Abstract bubble photography.

I spent couple of hours at home this afternoon to shoot these in my living room with the lighting coming only from the window. Enjoy and do let me know what you think. I will spend some time doing more abstract photography in the coming weeks while I am working on my next travel plan.

I could have cleaned up those tiny bubbles in Photoshop to make the image cleaner, but then I thought to just present them here as they are first. Maybe next time I cleaned them up. See more bubbles below.