Jim Barraud web designer

iPhone Macro Lens Fun!

This past Christmas, Mr. Jon Sykes bestowed upon me a macro lens for my iPhone. Hesitant to defile my pristine monolith with the sticky metallic ring required for the use of the lens, I took the plunge. And I haven’t regretted the application of that little ring since.

The macro lens comes as part of a wide angle lens that separates into two for the macro lens. Both are great and when combined with the iPhones already superb camera, they take tremendous photos.

This lens is so nice I had to buy it twice! (…because I inadvertently lost the first one). But that just gave me reason to pickup the fisheye lens as well. If you’re on the fence about picking these up, you won’t regret making the leap.

They can be purchased from the awesome Photojojo and will work with various other phones.

Instagram

Over the past few months I’ve been obsessed with a little app called Instagram. It’s an app for the iPhone that lets you take square format photos, apply a filter, then post to multiple services such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and others. You may seen the links to Instagram photos in your Facebook or Twitter stream, but Instagram is more than a “make your photos pretty and post to various services” app. It’s a community.

Within the app you can follow other users, comment or “like” their photos and discover other photographers via the popular feed or hashtags. Companies such as NPR and Starbucks have begun to utilize Instagram to disseminate news or post casual photos of company life.

As of now there isn’t web presence for Instagram users aside from the photos they decide to post to various services. The main Instagram experience is contained within the iPhone app, which makes it’s current 2 million user population all the more impressive. I expect that number to grow now that developers have access to the Instagram API and they start integrating it into their own apps and services.

I’ve posted a sample of my favorite Instagram shots above. You can find me on Instagram under the username “jim”.

David Sykes Print Store

Renowned British photographer (and friend) David Sykes has branched out from client work and has begun selling prints of his personal projects. His Faux Food project has garnered attention from popular online sites such as swiss miss as well as several print publications. David decided to utilize Big Cartel to sell a limited run of his Faux Food prints, but wasn’t happy with the default template options.

David approached me for help in updating the existing template, but he didn’t want anything too drastic. He was looking for enough of a change so it didn’t resemble a cookie cutter ecommerce template and complemented the presentation of his prints. After a couple hours of CSS updates I was happy to present David what I thought was a good solution given time and scope of the project, and he agreed.

If you’re looking for some great prints to hang in your home or office, I highly recommend these (or anything David produces for that matter). As of this writing he’s currently running a Spring sale for 25% off all of his prints. Take advantage while you can.

View the site

“People may have the impression that it is easy to make interesting images with a camera app like this, but it is not the case. At the heart of every solid image are the same fundamentals: composition, information, moment, emotion, connection. If people think that this is a magic tool, they are wrong.”

Damon Winter

Media-Hive Holiday Portraits

The theme for the 2010 Media-Hive holiday card was (very) loosely based on a Swedish dance band. Not sure of the direction we were going to take with this, we brought in a professional photographer to take various group and portrait shots. Me being my usual self decided to document the occasion with my iPhone. Some candid shots taken in front of the backdrop with my the CrossProcess app seemed to have the look we were going after.

I did a quick second shoot of portraits with my iPhone utilizing the backdrop and florescent overhead lighting. After some Photoshop touchup these portraits were sent to clients as a pack of postcards with a group shot selected from the first photo session.

View the final set of postcards and group shot.

Update: These photos have been featured on the Banana Camera Company website, the makers of the CrossProcess app. Thanks guys!

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JB

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