India trip enhanced with iPhone 4 and app

When I go on vacation, I always take two cameras. One is my professional SLR, which at this time is a Canon 5D Mark II. This year when my husband and I went to India, I happily took my iPhone 4 as my second camera. I used the Hipstamatic application for all the pictures I took with my phone.

The app is based on the Hipstamatic 100, which is a plastic analog camera developed in the 1980s. The Hipstamatic uses your phone’s camera but gives you the option of changing “lenses,” “films” and “flashes” to give your photos a particular finish, including black and white and colour. Camera phones aren’t perfect, though, so I would stick to using the Hipstamatic during daylight hours.

A lot of the lenses available through the Hipstamatic will give your pictures a coloured tone. As a photojournalist, I like to keep my photos true to life, so I used the John S lens with the Ina’s 1935 film to keep my photos from looking too different from those I would take with my SLR. The great thing about using this lens and film duo is that they work great in daylight, giving your photos a deep, saturated colour. On occasion, I switched my film to the DreamCanvas option, but use this lens sparingly, because it makes your image look as if it were shot on canvas. This can be a neat effect, but not one you want on all of your vacation photos.

The iPhone is a great second camera on vacation because it produces photographs with a high enough image quality that you can still make photo books and prints. I suggest setting your Hipstamatic to “high quality.” It takes a little longer to process, but you get a 10.7-megabyte file. This means you can make a nine-and-a-half inch square print at 200 dpi or a six-and-a-half inch-square print at 300 dpi. With the iPhone, as with any point-and-shoot camera, the user doesn’t have to lug around a cumbersome camera body or worry about messing up an exposure. Plus, the Hipstamatic gives you options to make your pictures look vintage in a way that camera non-connoisseurs couldn’t do before.

The Hipstamatic app costs $1.99 and comes with three lenses, three colour films and a flash. The standard equipment includes the John S lens and the Ina’s 1969, another of my go-to films. There also are several Hipstapaks available for 99 cents apiece. They include additional films, lenses and flashes.

As for the trip, we flew into New Delhi and spent four days exploring the new and old side of India’s capital, then took an overnight train to Udaipur. If your trip is of a romantic nature, this Venice of the East is a must-see with its numerous rooftop restaurants.

After a few days in Udaipur, we hopped another overnight train to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Agra is such a popular tourist destination that it is not hard to find a train or bus that will get you there from any city. Express trains with air conditioning run daily between Agra and New Delhi.

Chicago Tribune

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

via google.com

lens for iPhone