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00:00 – 17:17 – Eliza Kern and Ryan Kim talk Twitter photo filters and Flickr’s mobile app

17:18 – 17:34 – A message from GigaOM PRO

17:35 – 37:32 – Erica Ogg and Tom Krazit break down Microsoft’s iOS app store spat and whether Apple is breaking down against Google

37:33 – 40:35 – Parting gifts:

Tom recommends former paidContent-er Amanda Natividad’s sandwich cookbooklet

Erica recommends giving the gift of Starbucks giftcards, straight from the Starbucks app

Chris recommends NPR’s All Songs Considered best music of 2012 podcast

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Purple haze, all through my lens

iPhone 5

When I posted my original review of the camera, I noticed a purple glow in the top left hand corner of the above image. Since there was a blue diode on the speaker and the metal on the desk lamp was blue, I assumed that the purple glow was a trick of light caused by any reflections off the blue materials.

I was wrong.

Instead, the purple haze is a now well-known issue caused by several factors. The most common causes seem to be when shooting into bright daylight or having the light source be just off frame. This report by DP Review gives the best technical analysis of the issue I’ve seen.

Conducting tests, again

Since my initial analysis about the purple haze being caused by an odd light reflection was incorrect, I decided to test out this problem under better control. Previously, I had just tried to get the camera angle as correct as I could. For these tests, I held both iPhones on a stand that was in a consistent spot on my desk (and marked where on my desk it went so I could make sure it didn’t move). Due to the size difference between the two iPhones, the camera angle isn’t exact, but it’s as close as I could get it.

Now, instead of just testing how the iPhone 5 camera handles low-light situations, I was also trying to replicate the purple haze problem.

Test #1: A messy, well-lit desk:

This is shot with my blue desk lamp as the sole light source. My monitor and halogen lamp were switched off.

A messy, well-lit desk shot with an iPhone 5

A messy, well-lit desk shot with the iPhone 4S

Not much of a difference, huh? That’s to be expected since at this point it’s not a low-light shot, but a decently lit shot. I think the overall image quality of the iPhone 5 camera is better — mainly around the speaker grill — but I don’t see a big difference.

Test #2: A messy, not-so-well-lit desk:

For this shot, the blue desk lamp was off, the monitor was off. However, I angled the head of the halogen lamp so it shined directly against the wall, indirectly lighting the desk.

A messy, not-so-well-lit desk shot with the iPhone 5

A messy, not-so-well-lit desk shot with an iPhone 4S

For the record: the lighting between these two shots is exactly the same and with no flash. And lookie there, the iPhone 5 shot has some purple in it. What I find interesting is that the main light source is off frame and lighting the scene indirectly by reflecting the light off the wall and it still generated a purple tint. However, in every shot on the DP review, there was some blue in the source material or lighting, I did a follow-up test with just the iPhone 5 camera. In this case, the only light on was the halogen lamp lighting my work laptop off frame. In this case, there’s nothing blue in the scene and I wanted to see how the shot would come out.

No purple.

So, what does all this really mean?

So far from my tests the purple haze is caused by off-frame lighting, the color blue is present, and the low-light sensor has kicked in. Naturally, you may experience this issue under different conditions. Unfortunately, it’s been raining for two days here so I couldn’t test this under daylight conditions. After spending more time testing and researching this, I still fail to get worked up over it.  Yes, in certain conditions you may get a purple haze to your photographs. If this is something that would bother you — and that’s not sarcastic; shooting in those conditions might be standard for you — then the iPhone 5 camera is not the camera for you. That’s OK. There are plenty of cameras out there that will suit your needs.

However, if your aim is to get a usable capture in low-light situations, the iPhone 5 camera is better than the iPhone 4S. Most of the pictures I take with my iPhone are to remember an event by; not create a tack-sharp image.

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Initial camera impressions

At first, I was a tad disappointed with the camera in the iPhone 5.  Each iPhone’s camera has been significantly better than its predecessor’s. My general experience has been that for most day-to-day uses where the image has some decent lighting, you’re not going to notice a gigantic difference between the iPhone 4s and iPhone 5 cameras. I think that’s because the iPhone 4s camera was so good, that’s it’s like the Spinal Tap version of cameras: How much better can it be? None more better.

Instead of the camera lens, where Apple can make more significant improvements is in the software. According to Apple, the iPhone 5 has faster photo capture, better low-light performance, and improved noise reduction. My initial test backs those claims up. I noticed a huge difference in low light captures between the iPhone 4s and the iPhone 5. Below are two images of the junk pile on my desk:

iPhone 4s

iPhone 5

There are a few obvious points here. The first is that I really need to tidy up my desk. The second is the the iPhone 5 photo really is a lot better than the iPhone 4s. I’ve tried to line the two shots up as close I could (and for the pixel peepers, the controls for my headset have moved between shots).

With the iPhone 4s camera you can vaguely see an iPhone 5 box and my EarPod case. With the iPhone 5, the overall image quality is lot better. There are only two light sources with this capture: a Luxo-style lamp behind the iPhone 5 case, and a 27-inch monitor slightly off-camera. The iPhone 4s picture also has a lot of noise, which gives it some unwanted grain. The iPhone 5 camera, again, is much sharper. For giggles, I also took a panorama with the iPhone 5 in the same conditions.

The screen

Aside from the size, the iPhone 5 screen covers the full spectrum of sRGB. Apple has also eliminated one of the layers in the screen composition, moving the pixels closer to the edge. While overall the screen has better blacks and more saturation, it’s a subtle, subjective difference.

As a photographer, the overall screen quality between the two phones isn’t a big selling point. That’s because for the most part, I rarely show someone a photo on my iPhone. Usually, I’m posting it on Flickr, or sending it directly to someone. Where it will, however, come in handy is how it affects my overall workflow.

My iPhone 5 workflow

I tend to shoot a lot of low-light images — bands, for the most part — and the iPhone 5 will come in handy for that. While I doubt an iPhone camera will ever replace my DSLR as my main photo for these shoots, the iPhone 5 camera will increase the images I capture and immediately post to Facebook.

The screen, though, I think will have the biggest impact to how I handle shots taken on my iPhone. Since iPhoto for iOS takes advantage of the larger screen, I won’t feel as cramped when I edit the image. iPhoto is great for taking a photo, performing some minor edits like cropping and white balance adjustment, and then posting directly to Facebook.

One personal challenge I’m taking on this year is to enter a photo taken and edited solely on my iPhone 5 in one of the competitions my camera club runs. I continue to be amazed at what the iPhone 5 and iPhoto can do, and want to shake myself free of the mentality that I need to use my DSLR to create a competition-ready image. I’d be surprised if the technology hasn’t gotten to the point where an image taken and edited on an iPhone won’t at least score well. I’m a firm believer that the real magic of photography happens with the person taking the photo; not the camera he or she uses.

Final Frame

The iPhone 5, and the Camera app, is the best iPhone camera yet. But, that’s what we expect these days, isn’t it? While you may not notice a difference in the majority of your shots, if you deal with less-than-ideal lighting and don’t want to use a flash (an example that comes to mind is shooting someone blowing out the candles on a cake) the iPhone 5 camera will blow you away.

That said, previous iPhone cameras I’ve felt were worth the upgrade alone, but this camera upgrade feels more situational and subjective. I expect this is likely to be the case going forward. There’s only so many dramatic improvements you can make in a camera designed to fit into a slim body.  The biggest software improvement I want is an app — either from Apple or someone else — that shoots true RAW images. This would allow for better post-processing edits in software like Lightroom and Aperture. Unfortunately, the closest app I’ve seen, 645 PRO, still doesn’t take full RAW images.

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1. People laugh and make a joke about its size (it’s gargantuan).

2. I take a picture and show it to them.

3. People ask me how much the camera costs and where they can get one.

The Instax is so much fun that it’s my camera of choice now. The image quality is fantastic, and funny enough, having an instant picture printed on the spot has made my photo sharing more social.

Wax is for Instax
The Instax is basically a Polaroid camera. Click the button, and it spits out a shiny print out of the top of the body (hat tip to Brian Lam’s The Wirecutter for introducing me to it).

Part of the immediate appeal is that the Instax 210 Wide is cheap, just $55 over at Amazon. The film is pricey, costing just under a buck a print (film is sold in “twin packs” of 20 total prints).

I will tell you up front that there are a ton of reasons to not get this camera. It’s ridiculously bulky, coming in at 4.6 x 7 x 3.7 inches and weighing 9.8 ounces. Unless you break out your old Hammer pants, there is no pocket big enough for the Instax. It’s clunky as hell to carry around — feels like you’re dragging a novelty anchor around your neck. There’s a lag between when you press the button and when the picture is taken. It can be hard to focus, and is abysmal in low light.

But it. is. awesome. So much so that on a recent vacation to Hawaii the Instax was my primary camera.

Shoot to thrill
Using the Instax requires an entirely new mindset when taking pictures. First, there is no preview. No screen shows you what you’re about to shoot — you have to press the button and give a silent prayer to the photo gods that you have the right amount of light, people are framed OK, and what you want is in focus.

It also redues the number of photos you take (a buck per print will make you think twice). With iPhones and digital cameras it’s expected that you take hundreds of pictures, mostly because there’s no reason not to and the law of averages says that at least one picture will turn out the way you want it to.

You have to let all that go with the Instax.

Instead of trying to take a picture of everything, I was more selective. What moments were most special? This meant that I missed out on some spontaneous photo opps, but I honestly don’t remember those and cherish the ones I did take.

Share printer?
Having pinched and zoomed through so many pictures over the past few years, there is something wonderful about holding a an actual, physical print. You don’t swipe through it. You can’t throw a filter on it. You can’t post it online for hundreds of friends to see.

You hold it. Pore over it. Stick it on a wall. Or best of all — hand it to someone.

And this is how using the Instax has made my photo taking more social.

Some of that is fleeting small talk. “It’s a camera… Yeah, it is huge… No, it’s not an antique, I bought it a few months ago.”

But then I ask them to smile and I take a picture. We chat as we wait for the small white square to fill in with a vibrant color image (fingers crossed).

And then I give it to them. “Keep it.” I think it’s an odd situation for most people. Like they aren’t sure what to do with it. I’m handing them something — not a link, not a file, not an email address. But the smile on their face is worth more than a million “likes” on any social network.

Tips and tricks
If you’re interested in trying out the tao of Instax, here are a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up to create better images:

• If you’re going to get close, use the “macro” “lens” (it clips on to the front) and set the focal length to infinity. This gets your pics in focus.
• Always use the Flash indoors.
• Even if it’s bright outside, if your subject is in a shadow, use the flash

The Instax is great, but I haven’t given up on digital entirely. My iPhone is always with me and is still perfect for catching something crazy that my 2-year-old does spur of the moment. And I use a higher-end camera to take pictures and video for work. But I’m hooked on the instant. I want to try out the Lomo Diana (and all those toy lenses) with the Instax attachment, but have read that doesn’t work very well (let me know if your experience says otherwise).

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An upgrade to its popular Eyewitness photography iPad app last night adds an Eyewitness Premium option.

Premium (also, confusingly, called “Eyewitness Extra” in the app) includes an extra three photos per day and an adjacent Series of sporting photos for £1.49 per month. One daily photo remains free.

The Guardian launched Eyewitness when iPad debuted in April 2010 – a year and a half before the paper launched a news app on the device.

When it launched, Eyewitness was made free to users by a Canon advertising sell. Many publishers at the time had launched for free on iPad with similar marketing deals, not knowing what kind of audience they may find.

Now the iPad audience has been shown to be large, and potentially lucrative. Guardian News & Media says Eyewitness downloads to date are nearing one million. Monthly unique users in July were 156,773, it tells paidContent.

If a tenth of July’s Eyewitness users upgraded to Premium, then, the tier could make almost £23,500 per month for The Guardian, before Apple’s 30 percent commission. The Canon sponsorship is no longer part of Eyewitness; it’s not clear whether the decision to charge came from lack of advertiser renewal interest, or from a decision to swap ad-funding for payment.

This spring, The Guardian launched an Android crosswords app. From July, when a beta ended, it has required monthly payments of £1.49 or £1.99 beyond a two-week free trial.

The paper has 17,000 paying subscribers for its iPad newspaper edition.

It remains open-minded about charging for digital content, but is currently gung-ho about generating and delivering “open journalism” on the open web.

By launching chargeable apps, the publisher is picking off niche and utilitarian aspects of the whole about which readers feel passionate, perhaps passionate enough to pay. Neither one will be enough to generate game-changing revenue alone, but no-one will blame The Guardian for taking opportunities that present themselves in individual areas.

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It’s a very simple idea: If a photographer has taken a fine-art-quality snap somewhere around the world, they can upload it to Photocircle for consideration, choose the markup they’d like put on it and the percentage of that markup they’d like to see donated to charity.

Photocircle then sells the prints, and customers are given a list of three projects close to where the shot was taken. Once they’ve bought, the company hands over the donation — and gives an additional six percent of the base price to the project as well.

“There are other websites for photography, but there’s none with our concept,” founder Thomas Heinrich told me on Tuesday, the day of the launch. “You’d think someone would be doing it already, but we’re the first ones.”

Not all the projects are in the so-called developing world — one, for example, aims to give the less-well-off in Berlin a chance to take in culture they might otherwise miss. But the bulk are in places like North Africa, India and Latin America.

What kind of projects are we talking? Relief supplies for Sudanese refugees. Deprived children in Haiti. Health education in Cambodia.

The photographers need to give at least 30 percent of their revenues to the projects, but according to Heinrich, many of those who signed up during the closed beta have chosen to give as much as 70 percent.

Photocircle is quite keen on transparency, and some of those it’s partnered with are pretty high-profile, notably the UNHCR refugee agency and Plan International, the children’s development organization.

Early funding for the scheme comes from the European Social Fund, the Berlin Senate and the Beuth Technical University. According to Heinrich, Photocircle does want to be profitable at some point, but that’s not the main consideration. “We consider ourselves a social business,” he said.

It’s nice to hear the term used in that context for a change.

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For a simple service that lets people share their photos with others from a mobile device, Instagram gets a lot of criticism, bordering on hate. And it’s not just because the tiny startup is being acquired by Facebook recently for $1 billion, which will make all of its employees exceedingly rich — it’s because some people seem to believe that the ease with which amateur photographers can post photos to the service, and the filters Instagram provides in order to add special effects to them, are ruining photography. This isn’t really that surprising: it’s the same kind of criticism that has been made about blogging, citizen journalism and Twitter, among other things — and in each case the critics have been somewhat right, but mostly wrong.

In one of the most recent diatribes about the downside of the Instagram phenomenon, freelance writer and photographer Kate Bevan writes in the Guardian about how the use of cheap filters is debasing real photography — which she says used to require some level of skill to produce, and therefore had some level of quality — and how apps like Instagram and other photo-editing software encourages people to click and add pseudo-artistic effects without really thinking about what they are doing. As she describes it:

“For me, the Instagram/Hipstamatic/Snapseed etc filters are the antithesis of creativity. They make all pictures look the same. They require no thought or creative input: one click and you’re done.”

Should photography be left to the professionals?

Coincidentally, another rant about Instagram appeared at The Atlantic on the exact same day as Bevan’s piece, this one by Atlantic Wire staff writer Rebecca Greenfield. In it, Greenfield looks at the recent meme known as “Rich Kids of Instagram,” which makes fun of the cheesy snapshots that presumably wealthy users have taken of themselves with helicopters, famous people, etc. Like Bevan, the Atlantic writer also talks about how the filters Instagram features were actually based on classic photographic effects that often took a lot of money and time to produce, a point professional photographers also like to make.

Greenfield then discusses some of the archetypal photos that have become commonplace for users to post on Instagram — pictures of their food, their trips to exotic places, and so on — in order to make the point that the service is inherently shallow and fake. As she puts it:

“Some might call the process democratizing —- everyone is a professional! —- but really, it’s a big hoax. Everyone is just pressing buttons to add computer-generated veneers to our mostly mundane lives.”

These kinds of criticisms are not new, as a search for the phrase “Instagram ruining photography” illustrates: notorious technology curmudgeon John C. Dvorak has slammed the service as a “shlock photo-sharing app,” and The Verge hosted a debate in which two of its photo editors took opposite sides of the question. Dutch graphic designer Jaap Grolleman says that thanks to Instagram “we’re drowning in a sea of photos and I think our ability to filter the good from the bad almost disappears… there are only so many ways you can to take a photo of sandwich you and a billion other people had for lunch.”

Grolleman’s comment about lunch reminded me of what people said about Twitter when it first launched — and continued to say for a long time after that — which was that they weren’t interested in people tweeting about what they had for lunch. By now, of course, most people have come to grips with the fact that Twitter can be a powerful tool for distributing breaking news about all kinds of global events, including earthquakes, assassinations and revolutions. And the same kinds of comments were made about blogs as well — that they were just for unpaid writers living in their parents’ basement, and couldn’t possibly be taken seriously.

More photographers are better, and more writers and journalists

Running through many of these criticisms is a kind of anti-amateur argument: real photography should be left to professional photographers, real journalism should be left to professional journalists, and so on. Can tools like Instagram be used to post shallow photos of nothing in particular? Of course they can, in the same way Twitter can be used to post messages about what you had for lunch, and a blog can be nothing but a repository for your ranting about cats, or whatever your personal obsession might be.

But that doesn’t change the fact that these tools also break down the barriers for participation by talented amateurs of all kinds — photographers, writers, journalists and movie-makers. And smart media companies are taking advantage of this, as Sports Illustrated is by running Instagram photos for the first time. A professional photo-journalist made an interesting comment in a story about Instagram that ran in the Telegraph last year. As Teru Kuwayama put it:

“You could make an analogy to the advent of the electric guitar or electronic music. Much to the annoyance of classical musicians, those things made ‘everyone’ a musician. I grew up on punk rock, hip hop and death metal, so I welcome the post-classical age of photography, and the explosion of amateur expression that comes with it.”

That philosophy shouldn’t apply just to photography, but to other kinds of expression as well — including the explosion of amateur writing and journalism that has come through the blogosphere and Twitter and Facebook, and what Om has called the “democratization of distribution” that they allow, not to mention the explosion of self-publishing that Amazon’s Kindle has helped to create and even the use of platforms like Reddit for journalism. Are there lots of shallow uses of these tools? Sure there are. But that’s not the important part.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Luc Legay

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I’d be lying if it was a match made in heaven.  Overall I found Aperture slow, especially when previewing images. However, with Aperture 3.3, recently introduced at WWDC, I find myself singing its praises. There are three things I’m going to share with you that I really like: faster previews, better white balance and shared iPhoto and Aperture libraries.

Faster preview after import

Aperture now has an option to use the camera preview of images after import. This reduces that lengthy period after an import where Aperture pretty much let you do nothing. As someone for whom a light day of shooting means 150+ images, this is a life saver. I’ve noticed an overall improvement in image previews. I can’t tell if it’s because Aperture is still using the camera previews, or if they just made the program snappier overall.

Better white balance

Most often, I’m doing event photography (car shows, bands, demolition derbies and the like). None of these are known for great lighting and stationary models. As a result, if a photo captured the mood perfectly, but required too much post-processing to make it presentable, I’d just skip over it.

When I read that Apple included a skin tone white balance in this latest version I was intrigued. Most of the time I’d do a manual white balance filter by choosing a section of the image that was the most neutral and praying for a good result. To test the feature out, I experimented with an image of my friend Neal playing in a poorly lit club with a can light right above his head.

Left image is the original; right is with skin tone white balance applied.

It’s still not a great image. Some of the orange of the guitar is lost, but the skin tone is a little better and the coloring on the shirt is more accurate. I was impressed with how well Aperture handled the image though. This shot is a good representation of the conditions I shoot in and I can’t wait to use the skin white balance on the next band shoot.

Using the white-balance setting is easy. On the Adjustments tab, choose skin tone white balance and then use the eye dropper to choose the flesh area you want to balance the image against.

Shared iPhoto and Aperture libraries

You can finally share libraries between iPhoto and Aperture now (although only one program can access the library at a time). This helps keep unified libraries if you use the Add Image to iPhoto feature of Safari, or want to use iPhoto to do a quick import. Where I hope this is leading to is the next version of iPhoto that will allow albums and events created in iPhoto for iOS to show up on OS X.

Final thoughts

While I’ve read some people saying that Aperture 3.3 could be considered Aperture 4.0, I don’t share that view. While the features list is lengthy, there aren’t enough improvements to warrant a 4.0 version tag. That said, since the release of this version was tied to the introduction of the Retina MacBook Pro, Apple could have just upgraded it for the Retina display and called it a day. What these improvements do tell me is that Apple is serious about this program and its future.

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• Fotolia is taking a $150 million investment from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
• That announcement Wednesday appears prompted by rival Shutterstock having lodged an IPO filing to raise $115 million on Monday.

Fotolia previously took between $50 and $100 million from TA Associates, TechCrunch reported in 2009. The FT reports KKR’s investment buys it half of the firm.

“This is a market that will consolidate,” KKR’s European media investment head Philipp Freise tells the paper, adding KKR may use Fotalia as a vehicle for further acquisition.

Shutterstock, in its IPO filing, cites BCC Research as projecting the stock photography market to be worth $5.1 billion by 2013.

It made a $21.8 million profit on $120.2 million revenue from more than 550,000 active customers – that user count is 71 percent up from 2010, and Shutterstock served 58 million paid downloads.

Founded by French-born Russian Tscheltzoff, Fotolia, with a largely European executive team, is especially strong in Europe, where it last year acquired France-based Wilogo, a microstock upload sales site for logo designers.

Disclosure: paidContent uses images from Shutterstock, including the one on this page, taken by Douglas Freer.

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Still, that intense competition doesn’t seem to have shaken off the belief of wave after wave of startups that think they can stand out from the crowd and become the next Instagram. Next up? French service Sharypic, which has just gone live on the iTunes store.

The site, which is based in Paris but was funded by pan-European incubator HackFWD, offers a twist on the formula by focusing on events rather than people. The system is organized around real-world happenings, with pictures collated into albums that build events either by taking your location data or by users explicitly adding their images to a particular event.

Right now, for example, you can see lots of photographs from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, or the recent Rio Carnival. Navigating through the albums is easy and fast, and discovery of events — both through the app and the website — is smooth and intuitive.

I suppose that makes it not entirely dissimilar to Color, the crash-and-burn startup that raised $41 million, flamed out with the press and users, and then shifted gears to become a Facebook photo and video app.

But where Color had an expensive team and a bucket of money so large that left it vulnerable to launch hype, Sharypic is running lean and mean. And unlike, say, Instagram — which lets users apply retro filters to their photographs but really has no memory of what happened yesterday — Sharypic is centered around actual nostalgia. It wants to be there when you look back over photos, or help you discover what other people were doing at the same time as you.

That’s an important human emotion, and while Sharypic’s approach to it is not unique, it is at least defensible.

The site currently offers event owners and planners the chance to use a Pro version that will help them engage with attendees and collate photographs afterwards — something that gives it an actual business model, unlike many of its peers.

But still, photo apps are so numerous that it still feels like a crap shoot. I don’t know whether Sharypic can make an impact. It’s a nice app, and with some smart event partnerships, it may stand a chance of making some headway. But at some point there will be a massive amount of consolidation or collapse: perhaps the best objective for anyone wanting to be in this space right now is to build a strong user base for when it all shakes out.

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