Mobile Photography

Compact, discreet and packed with editing opportunities – is the Apple iPhone the ultimate travel camera? Richard Gray explains how he was converted.

1. It’s small You always have it with you, so when you go out for dinner and your waitress starts belly-dancing on your table, you’ll get the shot.

2. It doesn’t look like a camera This means you can get closer to that grizzled old man at his market stall before he reaches for his stick to ward you off.

3. You can edit your photos on the phone itself Which means endless entertainment when you’re back at the hotel while your wife is in the bath.

4. You can show all your friends your photos before you get home Posting to Flickr, Facebook or other photo sharing sites is a breeze.

Today is a big day for tech sites and Apple fanboys alike because it's the day that the Cupertino-based company announces their newest iPhones - the more affordable iPhone 5C and the more capable iPhone 5S - and as you might expect given the smartphone camera culture, the more expensive of the two came with some significant camera improvements.

The iPhone 5 (and 5C), the sensor boasts a 15% larger active sensor area, and peers out at the world through an all-new Apple-designed five-element f/2.2 lens — that translates into a reported 33% increase in light sensitivity.

iPhone 5C and 5S has a special "True Tone" flash that uses a white and an amber LED to yield the perfect intensity and color temperature.

Finally, the camera’s video capabilities have also been improved. You can now shoot slow-motion 720p video at 120fps, and go back in-phone to select where you want your video slow-mo and where you’d prefer regular speed.

"An in-depth guide on what is BitTorrent Sync and how to set it up on your iPhone and Mac or PC to sync files. BitTorrent Sync is one of the best of these bittorrent clients, and in this entry, we show you how to use it to set up your own file-syncing solution between your iPhone (or other mobile device) and your Mac or Windows PC."

Whether you are professional photographer that likes to travel light (i.e. without a laptop) or casual photographer that simply likes the convenience of using the iPad, there are a number of apps in the app store for editing photos. We have sifted through the bunch and selected some of our favorites.

So, we’ve got a bunch of improvements here that cross over from hardware to software and touch on user experience. All three Apple’s strong suits when it comes to integrated devices like the iPhone. If you peer more closely though, the biggest differences between an iPhone shooting experience and that of a traditional camera comes down to one thing: the image signal processor in the A7 chip.

The aperture isn’t that much bigger than competitors and the pixel pitch is actually smaller than the HTC One, for instance. And the sensor, though increased in size, is very tiny when compared to even point-and-shoot cameras.

The differences, then, come largely in how Apple’s ISP hardware and its front-end software mesh to make life easier for photographers. There’s a quote on Apple’s iPhone page which I think is nicely phrased:

“It just makes more sense to teach iPhone how to take a great picture rather than teach people how to be expert photographers.”

If you've done nothing more with iPhoto that toss your images into it like an old shoebox, it's time to dig into the best of those pictures and edit them into works of art. Chris Breen shows you how.

We’ve covered the anatomy of the iPhoto interface, the ways and means of importing and viewing images, and the mechanics of iCloud’s Photo Stream feature. This is all important information, but I know that many of you have suffered through these lessons with this single thought: “Let’s cut to the chase, already. Show me how to edit my pictures!”