eXtensions: AMITIAE

AMITIAE -Saturday 22 November 2014

Updates to iOS Photo Apps: Pocket Light Meter; Slow Fast Slow; 645 Pro Mk III

By Graham K. Rogers

iPhone

Some updates to some of the more useful (and newest) apps in my collection hve just been made available: Pocket Light Meter, Slow Fast Slow and 645 Pro Mk III.

Pocket Light Meter

I have found this invaluable in recent months with the arrival of a camera that uses 120 film. It is not that I am turning my back on digital photography, it is that sometimes I want to slow down and smell the flowers (metaphorically as well as literally). I have had to relearn much.

Pocket Light Meter takes its input from the iPhone sensors and displays time settings when the user enters ISO of the film being used and the aperture setting. I often scroll the aperture up and down so that a time setting that will avoid camera shake is displayed.

The update to version 9.2.1 has a significan improvement for low light level performance and, we are informed, a few more crashes have been fixed.

Slow Fast Slow

I reviewed this just two days ago as it is a recent arrival in the App Store for this part of the world and found Slow Fast Slow - from the makers of the Glif tripod support - to be easy to use. I was able to import video clips fairly easily and adjust them with a nicely designed interface: a child could have done this with no instructions.

The update brings the app to version 2.1 and allows export of adjusted clips in a new square (uncropped) format, which is apparently good for sharing on Vine and Instagram.

There are also a couple of bug fixes:

Videos uploaded via iTunes are now available to edit:
An issue that had some portrait videos distorted when exported to iTunes has now been fixed; and
There are general bug fixes.

645 Pro Mk III

Apart from the iPhone camera itself, which now has some neat tricks, 645 Pro Mk III could be my favorite app because of the way a user is able to set the camera up with the right film emulation, frame size and shape; and use a wide selection of filters. What also appeals to me is that copyright information can be embedded into the metadata of an image, and I can save images in a selection of file types, including TIFF.

As a direct result of this and other apps from Michael Hardaker and his team I began to reinvestigate medium format cameras and ended up with a Hasselblad that I take out from time to time.

Since its last major update to its Mk III iteration, which included manual controls, Michael Hardaker has released 11 updates for 645 Pro. While each has some bug fixes, most of the updates are improvements and new features that are being added to the app.

This time (4.11) there is a "snappier response" to changes in semi-auto modes; and the photo filter stepper always now disappears when it should. Full details of this and the previous updates are shown on the 645 Pro Mk III page on the iTunes App Store.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.

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