[frogoutofwater]

I have crossed over to the dark side and switched from an Android phone to an iPhone. One of the reasons why is because I'm thinking of developing a workshop for animal shelter/rescue/rehab staff and volunteers and photographing their animals, and many staff have iPhones, so it makes sense to teach them how to maximize their iPhone cameras' potential. (But in order to do that, I need to learn how to use an iPhone camera, to supplement the general knowledge I already have about photographing in rescue and rehab environments.)

But I'm also interested in using some of the iPhone apps that are out there to help when I'm using my K-3 - e.g., depth of field calculators, light meters, etc.

Does anyone have any tried and true favourites to share?

Thanks

[waterfall]

I like SetMyCamDF, a depth of field calculator. There are many such on the App Store. Some are free, some are $1.99.

[narual]

EasyRelease for model releases

GPS4CamPro to add location tags to your photos

LightTrac - this lets you plan out shots where the position of the sun or moon or shadows caused by either are important. Want the sun rising directly behind a building, dead center? It's only going to happen for a few days a year - this lets you map it out. It's also a handy way to look up moon phases and sunrise/sunset times. Sadly, cannot predict the weather months into the future, so if you're planning to travel for a specific shot on a specify day, here's hoping it doesn't rain

645 Pro - this is for using the phone as a camera rather than in conjunction with your Pentax, but it's handy. Gives you full manual control over shutter speed, aperture, ISO, white balance, and claims to save it as a high resolution tiff before any jpg compression is applied by the phone. I can't vouch one way or another, but I have a 16x20 print of the sun rising over our local farmer's market that looks pretty good, though I really wish I'd had my 15mm ltd and K5 with me that morning.

DOFMaster - Depth of Field calculator. You can just use their website, but it's handy to have it as an app sometimes.

LightMeter - Decent light meter/color temperature app. Add a Luxi and your phone becomes a pretty decent incident light meter

ShutterSnitch - with an EyeFi or Flucard or any other wifi enabled camera, you can use this to preview your images apply rules to them (updating metadata and so on) and set off warnings for specific conditions -- for example, if you're going to be shooting something moving fast, you can set it to warn you if your shutter speed goes below some level (maybe I'm just clumsy, but I accidentally change my shutter speed and aperture settings all the time. Seems much worse with K3 than it was with K5, I think because the position of the dials on the grip is a bit different). Also ISO, aperture, focal length, and light level. It also zebra stripes blown out highlights and I think shadows as well. More useful on a tablet, since it gives you a bigger preview picture, but still handy. Also, if you're in a possibly dodgy situation where some jackbooted thug may demand that you erase your camera (or even if you're just worried about a card failure and want extra protection) you can configure it to upload your photos to an FTP server or lots of other online backup locations as soon as you take them.

DarkSky - to help find places where you can actually see some stars at night.

Square Register - to sell your work to people with credit cards

Seek Thermal - with the Seek camera to check things like energy efficiency in your house (great justification for buying it!). If you do wildlife photos, it might help you spot something that you otherwise wouldn't see. FLIR One would work, too. It's just more expensive and more awkward to use. I had one and took it back after a few days.

[narual]

Further on LightTrac, just because it's such an interesting app:

Say you wanted to catch the sunrise due east from Chicago's Cloud Gate (AKA "The Bean") sculpture, or you wanted to photograph someone with their shadow trailing behind them about 1.5x their height, or you want to see what the light looked like for a photo you or someone else took at some point?

This is one of my favorite. One of the app screenshots attached shows what the app would have shown for the date and time the photo was taken.


(Yellow bar is sunrise, blue bar is sunset, red bar is position of sun at specified time. If Moon is highlighted, it uses the same color bars, but they refer to moonrise and moonset.)

I'm still trying to get a shot of a full moon over Notre Dame's administration building (the "Golden Dome"). Every now and then I mess with this app to try and pick a good time. It would be much easier if the building faced a different direction.

Attached Images

     

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Last edited by narual; 02-25-2015 at 02:18 PM.

[mattt]

Not on an iOS device myself, but available all the same:

TPE
Triggertrap
Marine Traffic
Hyperfocal Pro
Stellarium

[UncleVanya]

+1 for 645Pro.

[maxxxx]

Has anybody used PhotoPills? It's iPhone only and I have an Android phone but it looks very interesting.

[ramseybuckeye]

The Photographer's Ephemeris I haven't had it long enough to use all of the features. Similar to the LightTrac above, I couldn't tell you the differences. It was recommended in Outdoor Photographer, that's where I found out about it.

[mattt]

The Photographer's Ephemeris I haven't had it long enough to use all of the features. Similar to the LightTrac above, I couldn't tell you the differences. It was recommended in Outdoor Photographer, that's where I found out about it.

AKA TPE

I actually found it before the write up in Outdoor Photographer (I did see it there too). A local photographer was using it to shoot images around Niagara Falls. I put it to work in Northern Ontario to get things all aligned and be there at the right time of day.

[sundr]

+1 for 645 pro and TPE. I also use mylightmeter. For a depth of field calculator/ exposure calculator/ flash calculator I could recommend Photo Aide.

[mythguy9]

DOFMaster is not free, but you can pin its website as a quick-access icon. But you can only use the website when you have internet access.

Pocket Light Meter is also good to have, and it's free.

When location settings is on, iPhone geotag its photo automatically (take 2 pics, one with DSLR and another with phone to manually record location), no need for fancy geo apps, unless you want better user interface and manual controls.

[6BQ5]

+1 for Pocket Light Meter!

I use TrueDoF-Intro. It's a decent, and free, depth of field calculator.

Not specifically Pentax related - I do have the Flickr and Snapfish apps on my iPhone. Snapfish was (is?) offering 100 "free" photos every month when the order is submitted through their app. You can import the photos from your Flickr account using your computer but the order must come in through your iPhone. The cost to "free" is S&H. For me it's about $0.09/photo.

[narual]

DOFMaster is not free, but you can pin its website as a quick-access icon. But you can only use the website when you have internet access.

Pocket Light Meter is also good to have, and it's free.

When location settings is on, iPhone geotag its photo automatically (take 2 pics, one with DSLR and another with phone to manually record location), no need for fancy geo apps, unless you want better user interface and manual controls.

The geotagging app I mentioned, you tell it when you start taking photos, and when you're done, you tell it you're done, then take a photograph with your camera of a QR code. When you import into LR, you run the matching desktop software, point it at the QR code, and it geotags all your photos. Doing that stuff by hand is silly, unless you're only going to be one place, and then you don't really need the phone to geotag it, you can just do that in lightroom by clicking on a spot on a map. And if you have more than one camera (or you're traveling in a group), if each camera takes a photo of the QR code, and it can geotag them all. It's a whopping $4 for the Pro version vs $3 for the standard version (I have no idea what the difference between the two is. Probably the Pro gives you better options for fine tuning how often it logs location.)

Our city launched a project to demolish a large number of abandoned/nuisance houses. I was asked to make a photographic record of an area that was roughly 17x10 blocks in size, and some of it wasn't the sort of neighborhood I'd feel comfortable walking around with a camera in (nor was there any way I was going to spend that much time walking and taking photos as a favor to someone). I loaded this software up, popped the sigma 10-20 on my camera, and had a friend drive me through the area, snapping a photo every half second or so. Not the best I've ever taken, but they didn't have to be. I probably could have just used my GoPro. Anyway, with the software, I was able to have every photo mapped pretty close to its actual location. Would have been better if we'd been in my car, which had a phone charger - I had the gps app logging every 4 seconds to save battery life since it was almost dead when we started.

Here's hoping the next Pentax camera has built-in GPS + compass tagging without needing any extra hardware plugged into it. That would be even easier.

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Photographer's Ephemeris does look a lot like LiteTrack, but prettier (and a bit more expensive). If it has the ability to slide through days without having to stop at each one and save, or better yet to say "find me a day when the moon will be at this angle in this time frame, I would happily pay for it and switch. The companion app for shot planning looks great, too. And they have a free browser version: The Photographer's Ephemeris - Web App -- thanks for the link!