Following on from my “best camera” post, here’s an iPhone photograph. I’ve discovered a good tool for improving photos quickly and easily. There’s a good, cheap app called TiltShift Generator, which, essentially adds a blur gradient to your photograph. Although it is nominally intented to recreate the look of a tilt/shift lens, it in fact has a far more everyday use than that. I’ll explain.
Cameraphones have teeny, tiny sensors. The upshot, and downside, of this is that they have massive depth of field. So much so that my iPhone does away with focus altogether, safe in the knowledge that everything from a couple of feet or so in front of you to the horizon will be acceptably (depending on your definition) sharp.
What this tiltshift thing does, if used subtly, is restore that sense of depth of field. No, it’s not fooling anyone in comparison to real depth of field, but it does enough of a decent impression that the mind accepts it, and makes photgraphs look normal again. The grammar of photography has built up in our minds eye since it’s invention, to thoroughly mix a metaphor, and this is one of the things we expect.
I recommend giving it a go. The interface is as simple as can be, and the results are really quite good. I’ll post some examples in the near future, so that you can see what I’m on about. Just don’t overuse it, is my advice. Like the best effects, it should be invisible.