Rats!

Completely unrelated picture of a dead rat with an ant in its mouth.

As I walked towards the shore to get closer to the windsurfers in Apelviken, I remember checking my pockets. Should I zip them up in case my LX3 falls out? I patted down my side pocket and felt that it was secure. No way that my iPhone could jump out of my chest pocket with its deep lining. Right.

Last week I was in Sweden to oversee the final preparations for our impending wedding there next month and I dropped my iPhone into the sea. I try to keep things in perspective, but it had started badly, my fiancée missed our flight because the Swedish Embassy hadn't cleared her visa as promised, and so we couldn't apply for the marriage license. No wedding at this stage.

The plan was to secure the wedding license and a band. I tried every band in the region, with no luck, and then some more bands on the other side of the country, and they were all booked. Silent wedding, great. And then I dropped my phone in the sea. Rats.

It was a small skip - not even a jump - between two rocks that caused it, one of those moments that seemed to happen in slow motion. Somehow the phone must have been lodged just SO because it projectiled out of my pocket, up under my nose and away from me, my hand nearly caught it but the phone evaded my grasp perfectly, bounced on another rock and then into the sea.

Luckily the water was fairly shallow where it landed and I stepped in immediately to retrieve it. I got soaked, sure, but at least I had my phone again. The strange thing was that it still worked! I could not believe it. It had only been in the sea a few seconds, but it worked.

I hurriedly walked back to the car, hoping that no one had seen the idiot walking into the sea and quickly putting a soaking wet phone back into the pocket where it had jumped out of. Back in the car I checked the phone. I could swipe to unlock it, tried an app but then it locked up again. I started shaking out water, lots of it, but it still worked.

Then it began to flicker. Then the bottom half of the screen went white. It started vibrating non stop. After a few minutes it finally went dead. I placed it on a radiator overnight in the vain hope of it drying out and working again. I hardly slept that night, all those images, notes, emails, work, heck - all of my life was on that phone!

Of course it didn't work the next day. I was in grieving. Disconnected from the world. I remember working as a mobile telecomms researcher in the 90's, working for O2 and Vodafone, telling my director that one day our phones will handle everything, and him telling me that will never happen. He is still in his old job.

But traumatic it was, as Yoda might've said. I lost a handful of images taken during the trip, that's all, and the only thing I've gained is a question: how-did-we-do-it-before-internet-phones?

The submerged phone has now been jiffy bagged and sent off to the insurers and I've kindly been lent a spare 3GS from a colleague, and the wedding is still on! My fiancee got another flight the next day and the above mentioned colleague has also accepted DJ'ing at our wedding. Woot!

Thanks to my colleague Valroy, thanks to the the Visa handler at the Swedish Embassy for sorting my fiancées papers in London and thanks to my hometown's bureaucracy for being so considerate with our missed appointment.

In other news, get some some visual pleasure, watch Henri Cartier-Bresson and pay close attention, photographers.

Oh, and check out my website at www.magnus-andersson.com, its gone live. Constructive comments only, if any, please.

Spring is here

Bumble bee sucking spring nectar. © Magnus Andersson

Today we had +15C in London, a marvellous spring day with plenty of bird song and numerous bumble bees waking up from their winter slumber, drunkenly sucking all the nectar they can find on the new flowers. Mum and dad find it hard to believe as apparently they had -11C yesterday, so this is for the doubters back home. ;)


Spring flower. © Magnus Andersson


Spring flower. © Magnus Andersson


Spring flowers. © Magnus Andersson

Autumn (updated)

Discarded shoe and autumn leaves. © Magnus Andersson

Autumn has arrived in London. This morning it was cold and raining, the leaves were hurling themselves off the branches of the trees. Only six months more of this stuff! :)

_________________

Updated 06/10/10

I think I jumped the gun a bit, it turned out to be a lovely day in the end; see pic's below from Battersea Park where I had some time to kill after arriving early for a Royal appointment. /M

© Magnus Andersson

© Magnus Andersson

Directing for reel

iPhone 3GS Tilt & Shift Photography from magnusphotog on Vimeo. © Magnus Andersson

If you don't like the iPhone and/or hate reading about it, you should probably skip this post. Furthermore you'll also be spared the details on what a sad life I live, when an app on a mobile phone can give me so much pleasure.

For the rest of you; above you can watch a slide show of photographs which I took on the iPhone 3GS. Nothing special about that of course, lots of other phones have got much better cameras, but not many of those are as much fun, or as versatile.



With the release of the iPhone 4 I got a bit intrigued about iMovie on the iPhone. Of course I tried installing it, but having an older handset meant that I wasn't allowed. Bummer. So I looked around to see what else was out there to edit video and I found ReelDirector. I now realise that a lot of people have been raving about it already; its been out for quite a while - but as soon as I tried it I fell in love with it.

I readily admit that I don't shoot a lot of video, either professionally or personally, BUT having the ability to create slide shows from still images natively on the iPhone is such a treat. Its been a while since I used Soundslides and that program is just a pain in the arse. The advent of Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere and even iMovie on Mac's made it all so much easier, and now its even easier on your mobile.

ReelDirector outputs to .MOV and you can either email it or save it to your camera roll as a compressed version. The rendering takes an age of course, the processor on the 3GS isn't as powerful as on the iPhone 4, but leave it for a while and soon you'll hear the bell announcing completion.

Music rendering can occasionally throw up a little time shift, notably a second or two of slowing down the pitch, but apart from that it works just fine. The amount of transitions that you can choose from is very versatile and the only big gripe I have about the app is that there is no way of choosing orientation of a new reel, i.e. will the latest output come up as a landscape or portrait video?

Extremely annoying and I do hope that the creators - Nexvio - will issue a fix for this soon. On the plus side, you can use music from your own library (albeit not directly from the iPhone, you have to do it from your own computer over Wi-Fi first, but its easy enough) and you can combine still images with video if you so wish, split clips etc. A lot of people seem to prefer ReelDirector over iMovie as well, and that says a lot.



Above all though, ReelDirector is so much fun to use and for £2.39 its a snip! This little app combined with the previously mentioned ZoomIt and a SD recording camera gives you one of the most compact multi media production kits on the planet. Other planets have even smaller stuff, but sadly they don't ship to Earth yet.

PS. Here's a link to the same slide show uploaded to youtube, but I find that the resolution seems to be a bit lower over there compared to Vimeo, maybe its just my eyes?

Gear change

The nifty little ZoomIt SD card reader for iPhone. © Magnus Andersson

This morning my ZoomIt arrived! I ordered this in early February and four months (!) later it is finally here. I paid $49.99 for mine and got a free 4GB SD card for being one of their first customers. They had various problems with manufacturing, including having to wait for Apple to deliver a key component. I'm pretty sure that Apple deliberately delayed delivery to ZoomIt so that they could get their own Camera Connector Kit for iPad ready (it only costs $29, but doesn't work with the iPhone as far as I can tell), but never mind.

The ZoomIt is a small device which connects to the iPhone and via the free app it turns into a SD card reader and a file management system. It means that you can now move large files to and from the phone and that's great news for us photographers with SD recording cameras! My walk around kit has always been a good compact camera - currently the LX3 - but its always been frustrating to instantly share pictures, having to revert to the iPhone and its camera with little control. Don't get me wrong, I love the usability of the built-in camera, its fun to use, especially when there are so many apps to edit your pictures with, and its easy to share them online, but you never had full control over focus or exposure and file sizes left a lot to be desired - until now.

The ZoomIt connected to the iPhone. © Magnus Andersson

After charging the internal battery for 20 minutes it was good to go and it works straight away. You plug in the reader to the phone, pop in your card and then launch the ZoomIt application. It should say 'Connected' on your screen and then you can start moving your images and videos onto the iPhone for editing with your favourite apps. I tried it out this morning with this tweet and it works a treat! Everything on the card shows up, so you can keep movies, TV shows, music and other documents on a separate card and transfer to the File Manager when you need it.


My walk around kit; a battered LX3, a shiny new ZoomIt and the slightly scratched iPhone 3Gs. © Magnus Andersson

The only drawback so far is that they have opted for a proprietary USB cable that you have to use to charge the internal battery and I can see this being a problem if you forget it at home or worse, loose it. Battery capacity could also be an issue, but I've only had it a few hours so its too early to tell.

All I need now is a CF card version so I can edit D700 pictures on the iPhone, but so far there have been very little movement on that front. Come on, developers, you can do it!

Postcards from Tunisia

A lucky shot where a butcher cleans his shop front wearing a cow's head. © Magnus Andersson

Back from a fantastic holiday in Tunisia, I though I'd share some impressions of this place. We stayed in a beautiful hotel in the tourist resort of Hammamet on the northeast coast, which is dominated by these huge hotel complexes along the beach with the rest of the city up in the hills. We arrived in the evening so our first impressions was that of darkness and crazy traffic. This is a place without a single traffic light and I must say, as someone who navigates horrible London traffic every day, it was a breath of fresh air. It simply works and I think we should introduce the system here as well. What do you say, Boris?


A woman doing the arduous task of weaving a carpet. It takes a month just to do one square meter. © Magnus Andersson

Dust! It gets everywhere and it isn't that strange, its a country in the Sahara desert, and you soon learn to breathe through your nose at all times, otherwise you get a mouthful of the stuff in just a few minutes.


Collage of some of the portraits of the president which were everywhere. © Magnus Andersson

The police seems to be everywhere, every single roundabout is manned day and night, and they routinely stop vehicles although we didn't have any trouble with them. Another omnipresent was the portrait of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the man who has been Tunisian president since 1987. Add to that that during our stay there were local elections in the whole country, and you felt that he was watching you from every corner. The ruling Tunis party took some 90% of the votes, but you can hardly call it a democratic country, more a one-party state. The EU have now entered talks with Tunisia with their record on democracy very much in the spotlight.


The old Medina in Karouan, central Tunisia. © Magnus Andersson

There is a lot of construction going on in the tourist resorts but elsewhere in the country it seems as if construction all of a sudden stopped. Endless houses are left unfinished and there are many shanty towns where the poorest live. There are also nomadic shepherds along the roads and in the fields. They stay in makeshift tents and roam from area to area in order to feed their sheep. I never managed to get close to them but they seemed to lead an age old existence and would love to explore them more when I return.


iPhone panorama of the amphitheatre in El Djem (El-Jem). © Magnus Andersson

Once you get out of the tourist resort Tunisia becomes much more interesting. We hired a car and went to Karouan in the centre of the country. Here we visited the Great Mosque, the 4th holiest place in Islam and a beautiful building to behold. While there we also looked around in the old town Medina. It is of course a very poor country but the beauty of their buildings and especially their doorways was extraordinary. We also went to El Djem and its Roman amphitheatre, dating back to 238AD, capable of seating an amazing 35,000 people, and still in great condition.


Fruit stalls by the road side like this one are all over the place. © Magnus Andersson

We got lucky with the ash cloud, on the day we left the airports of nearby Morocco had closed but we managed to find a window and leave on time, however, with our very last meal, my fiancee managed to get food poisoning and had to seek medical help in the airport. A word of warning, Tunisian health care is not of the same standard that we are used to back home. The doctor was going to inject her with something when he dropped the needle on the floor. He promptly picked it up and tried to attach it to the syringe again, thinking it was perfectly normal practice to use dirty needles. My fiancee protested and he grudgingly replaced it with a new one. He then needed two attempts before a successful injection. Yikes.


One of many tanks left from WWII battles in the eastern hills of Tunisia. © Magnus Andersson

There is so much more to say about this beautiful country, but tomorrow its back to work again so I need to catch some sleep, but man, it was a good holiday.


The Great Mosque in Karouan. © Magnus Andersson

iPhone dump #03

Line of yellow buoys in Greenwich Dock, Rotherhithe. © Magnus Andersson

Time for a little blog pause! I haven't been prolific in my postings lately and as I have the next two weeks off work, I've decided that I might as well officially rest the blog along with myself. A trip to Tunisia beckons and I think that the batteries will be recharged after that.

I've been told that there were some 70-odd applicants for the job we had going at the paper, luckily I wont be involved in sorting the wheat from the chaff, instead I'll be on a beach in north Africa with no internet access. Bliss.

BTW, these iPhone dumps are all shot and edited in-phone so to speak. The only Photoshopping I do on them is amending the meta data with a copyright notice and resizing them to be 750px wide, the rest is edited via either the brilliant Photogene and/or TiltShiftGen (such as the one above). I've also been in touch with Omer who developed the Photogene app and he will be looking into adding the GPS-location when tweeting a picture. That would be sooo nice.

Now I have to pack and I've been thinking about bringing the Hasselblad or perhaps the D700 with a 50/1.4, but this is a holiday after all, so the pack list reads: sunglasses, t-shirt, shorts, sandals, towel plus a good book and the LX3.

iPhone dump #02

Erosion. © Magnus Andersson

iPhone dump #01

Mother and baby statue inside the Stephen Lawrence Centre. © Magnus Andersson

Friday 13th

A crow flies past the war memorial at Greenwich Cemetery, where - for no apparent reason - no wreaths were laid for this years Remembrance. © Magnus Andersson

Friday 13th...to some its a sign of a really bad omen, for others its good luck. To me? It's a day where I have to say that the camera on the latest iPhone is actually really decent, now that I've had some time getting used to it.

For the pixel peepers, I've left it hi-res, so click on the image to see the full Monty of what the 3Gs can do. Minor curves adjustments done.

Have a good weekend!

Au revoir Perpignan

Sunset at the end of Boulevard Henri Poincare. © Magnus Andersson

We're packed and waiting for our bus to Barcelona and one of the most enjoyable holidays is coming to an end. I'll be posting more images later but rest assured, I will definitely come back again next year!

Perpignan day 5

Panorama of Perpignan and the Pyrenees as seen from Palais de Rois de Mallorca. © Magnus Andersson

Last nights party was immense and I kept running into people I know. We were amongst the very last to leave and despite being a lot worse for wear, we still had time to photograph the fire department putting out a blazing car.

Today has been the best day by far though. Canon again showed their worth by renting a huge boat and taking us on a Mediterranean cruise with food, wine, music and swimming. Look out for the forthcoming calendar...proper pictures and more stories to come later, above is an iPhone panorama taken from the medieval palace with The Pyrenees in the background.

Perpignan day 4 - breakfast

Breakfast at Visa HQ; Hotel Pams. © Magnus Andersson

A quick snap from the luxurious breakfast at Hotel Pams this morning, consisting of a small baguette and some coffee in a plastic cup. They spoil us!

Today I have laid hands on the not-yet-released Leica M9; full frame and 18mp at 14-bit depth; yours for just over £5000...

I also bumped into Charly and he had some juicy Magnum gossip which I might have to tell you about at some point, but dinner beckons, and then the grand finale party!!!

Perpignan day ???

Inside the photo agencies area. © Magnus Andersson

They say that you shall never blog whilst drunk, which usually is good advice, but I'm breaking the rule here tonight because time is of essence. Wifi is surprisingly hard to come by in Perpignan, mainly I get it here at the hotel so I have to be quick while it lasts.

We've just returned from a secret (and massive) Canon party at El Boca Boca courtesy of a special invite from Per Karlsson at Canon Sweden. Lets just say that we appreciated the VIP passes that granted us upstairs access and unlimited champagne! Merci Per!

Alas I am only serving up iPhone pictures so far as I didn't bring my laptop, but rest assured, there's plenty of good pix on my Lumix to come, in the meantime, check out Mattias' blog - he brought his Lumix AND his laptop!

Perpignan day 3

Poster advertising the festival in Perpignan. © Magnus Andersson

Yesterday started off with an fromage et chantarelle omelette and a properly strong cup of coffee at a small cafe, before we collected our press accreditation at the Visa HQ. Inside we bumped into photographers Robert Henriksson and Martin vonKrogh , and proceeded to pick up the press pack, which later got stolen at Habana; luckily I had my LX3 in my pocket rather than the press bag...phew.

Next we checked out three exhibitions, one on Afghanistan, one on Congo and finally one on Obama. We then headed over to Palais des Congres where got to put our mitts on two new Canon's: 7D and G11.

Of the two the G11 is the most interesting, finally we see an end to the pixel mania, this one sporting only 10MP instead of 14MP as seen on it's predecessor; the G10. The reduction of pixels in favour of quality also reveals Canon effectively as having deceived all their customers up till now, quite happily leading the masses to believe it's only about mega pixels. Of course the other manufacturers are equally to blame, but at least they are now seeing sense.

After that we had our picture taken by Remy Cortin, right after he had photographed David Burnett. In the presence of a legend, we thought about making conversation and chickened out...anyway, there were lots of free rose wine to be had at Scanpix's party.

Right after that we headed over to Place de la Loge where Nikon tried to swoon us with more wine. That would have enough for any evening but instead we headed over to the main square and the massive 30-metre screen of slide show projections led by Jean-Francois Leroy. After that we headed to the main watering hole at La Poste and then danced at Habana and got home at around 4 or 5, no one is quite sure when...and we're still quite undecided about today, head hurts a bit.

Perpignan day 2

Palm trees at Barcelona airport. © Magnus Andersson

Yesterday was a long day, we didn't arrive in Perpignan until 11pm as the group from Sweden was delayed which then meant having to go through rush hour traffic in Barcelona...but at least I got a view of some palm trees at the airport while I killed six hours!

We still managed to get food and drinks though, in fact we didn't get in bed until 3am and managed to bump into two friends from London who had decided to come last minute!

Now we're off to get breakfast and then our accreditation.

We're on our way to Perpignan

Stansted departure lounge, headed for Barcelona and then Perpignan. © Magnus Andersson

I'm at the departures lounge in Stansted airport, waiting for the flight which will take me to Barcelona. There I will await the finest of Swedish photojournalism before we all board a bus headed across the French border to our destination; Visa in Perpignan!

I'm not sure how much blogging will get done from there, it all depends on wifi access, otherwise there'll be more on here when I'm back next week.

Lunch post via iPhone

Lambeth Cemetery panorama. © Magnus Andersson

I'm on my lunch break, enjoying a pasta salad with tuna and the panoramic scenery of Lambeth Cemetery. This has of course been captured, edited and posted with my new phone, which grew even more in stature yesterday when I discovered the joys of VNC Lite.

I was controlling my laptop from my iPhone, being able to open an image from the hard drive, edit it in Photoshop, save it and then email it through Outlook. If you then combine it with the excellent Dropbox, you've got everything you ever need for remote photo blogging and remote storage.

I think I might have to do a run down of my favourite apps at some stage, but right now I'm just wide eyed in amazement of the capabilities of this gadget.

It's my first iPhone and I've had it less than a week, but so far the only disappointment is the sometimes patchy network coverage by O2, but that is hardly Apple's fault.

Mobile blogging

Keyboard shot with the new iPhone 3Gs. © Magnus Andersson

So, you have got the new and amazing Apple iPhone 3Gs just like a lot of people, but you're still wondering how to post to Blogger on the go? And maybe you have tried logging in and found that you can only type in the words for the header of the post and then the tags, but you're still wondering how to type stuff in the main body of the post??? And trying to upload an image through the user interface doesn't work either.

I was flabbergasted when I realised that the brand spanking new iPhone wouldn't let me do live blogging with pictures, and the fact that blogspot hasn't yet released an iPhone app for the biggest blogging tool on the planet is just ridiculous. Seriously, what are you guys doing at work? Playing on your iPhone's?

There are some blog apps out there but they all have some flaws, so why pay when you can work around it for free?

Panoramic living room, stitched via the Panorama app from The iFone Guys. © Magnus Andersson

The way to approach this is two-pronged: start off by emailing the iPhone image to your blogger account. Here's a page telling you how to set that up. This will create the post.

Next you need to log in your blogger account, select the newly arrived post and start editing in HTML. If you try editing in compose mode, you'll find yourself limited to a title and tags only, but I suppose if you don't want a body of text, this fits the bill perfectly. That's it, you are done, welcome to blogging text and pictures together via the iPhone. Here's an earlier post on how I hacked blogger to make images appear much bigger.

Of course there will be some problems when you start adding multiple images, but a little HTML goes a long way, just tinker around for a bit and it will work. Everything else seems to work as it should, spell checker, hyperlinks, etc.

The only problem with mobile photo blogging on the iPhone is that you are stuck with the rather crappy camera, as witnessed in the two pic's above, so hopefully my next post will be more related to photojournalism rather than geeking your asses out on my latest toy. No promises though...

New toy

So I finally managed to get my hands on the new Apple iPhone 3Gs and I have to say it is amazing! Quite possibly improving quality of life as we know it. I mean what other product lets you play Assassin's Creed whilst in the loo? This post has of course been brought to you from my new toy...quite possibly also written in the loo. Revolutionary stuff indeed.