Two more great iphone photography apps

  

   As I said in a previous article, the iphone is an amazing device.  Actually, I think I mentioned 'incredible', but amazing will certainly work.  One of the reasons it is so amazing is its user-friendly adaptability. There are over 350,000 apps currently to chose from!  Right now I'm going to tell you about 2. 

   Since the iphone 4's camera is so advanced for a 'simple' phone, it lends itself well for upgrades and adaptations.  These apps truly turn a good camera into a great one.  However, most cameras these days multi-task.  Not only do they take still shots, but video as well.  And that is what I'm going to talk about first.  Video.

   Yes, your iphone 4 can take pretty decent video.  But what do you do if you want to make a MOVIE?  Well, you download Splice of course!

   Splice is a video editing app.  A movie maker!  Lets say you went on a vacation to the North Pole.  And you took 10 cool videos of Polar Bears eating baby seals, Polar Bears chasing your friends with the intention of eating them, and a great video of the Polar Bear giving up and taking a nap on an ever dwindling supply of ice-bergs.  What do you do with the 10 clips?  You load them into Splice.  And you make a movie.  Splice enables you to chose wither you want 'landscape' or 'portrait'.  Chose landscape, portrait when enlarged gives a thin shot with huge boundaries, not good.  However, it gets better!  You then have the option of composing a title and chosing a soundtrack from your itunes library or other sources.  Splice will only take one song or piece of music but it gives you the option of raising or lowering the volume by scrubbing through the clips you chose.  That way, in the clips that have dialog, the music will be background music, or silent and in the dramatic shots, you can bring it into the forefront. But Splice is not limited to video only.  You can add stills as well, and edit how many seconds you want them to run.  

   In between clips and shots, you also have the ability to insert transitions, fade outs, fall left, fall right etc, and also audio which you can record using your iphone's mic.  All of this can be edited and viewed in a timeline and also previewed.  

   When you are satisfied with your movie, you can then render it into your camera roll in hi def.  It can also be shared on facebook etc.  One feature that is very impressive with Splice is its rendering speed. Its very fast, which is a very good thing!  That, and it is very intuitive, that is, easy to learn.

   Ok, so now you have your movie on your camera roll and you want to email it.  Problem is, its too big a file.  Most likely.  So what do you do?  All the videos on my site, Urban Life, were shot with my iphone 4 and cut with Splice.  And every one, unless made with stills only, were over 100mb!  Not a small file.  So I recommend Photo Transfer App.  

   Photo Transfer App is the fastest way to get your videos and all of your photographs onto your computer, or you can do the reverse.  Load from your computer to your iphone.  This is done with your wireless, ie, WiFi.  As anyone who's owned an iphone can testify, it can be infuriatingly time consuming to synq your photos to your computer.  Before I discovered Photo Transfer App, I would synq my pics and invariably would come up with dupes.  MANY DUPES.  Not only that, sometimes you just want to download 1 special picture and the only other option was email.  Forget video.  And really forget a movie, its just simply too big.  

   So with PTA, once in the app and on the PTA page on your computer, you simply browse through your camera roll, check the pics you want to download, select the file destination on your computer, then hit 'send'.  At which time you hit 'refresh' on the PTA page on your computer and the download begins.  It can do numerous pics, but only one video at a time.  And if you've made a movie with Splice, that one file can be 150mb so its a very valuable app.  The last impressive feature of PTA is, like Splice, the small amount of time required to complete the task at hand.  In short order, you have your movie downloaded to your computer and then its on to You Tube and you're GOOD TO GO!  The whole world can now see how you saved an entire family of baby seals and your friends from hungry Polar Bears, and you'll be a hero!  

   Get these apps, They're really useful and FUN!  If you like this article, hit the LIKE button!