I love how water beads up. I love the appearance of water period, always so many ways to capture it. Yesterday there was rain on my windshield when I came back to my car with these beautiful drops. I enhanced them a little with HD, which also brought out the background; jacked the contrast and done.

I’m continually amazed by the iPhone camera. It is capable of capturing images with incredible clarity, depth and effects. I. This case, I was able to bring out the detail of the wood panelling, in normal light, with a quick snapshot as I walked past this staircase.

I like grainy black and white photos, they’ve always spoken to me of mysteries revealed, secrets that must be divined. So I was thrilled when I found Simply B&W, which has a feature to add grain. Like using Tri-X back in the old days. While watching the Red Sox suffer through game 4 of the ALCS, it seemed like a good time to play with it.

A friend recently recommended TiltShift, an interesting iPhone app that allows you to define an area as a mask and blur the rest of the pic.  It is similar to what PhotoNoir does with lighting.  There are also settings for contrast, saturation, and brightness, as well as a few other tweaks.

As a quick test, I did a re-do of a blog picture from a few months ago, which I had painstakingly blurred using PaintFX and wasn’t really happy with.  I took the original image of a man holding a baby, used TiltShift to blur everything except where their arms crossed, and pulled it into SimplyB&W for B&W, contrast, and a little grain. All in all, I’m much happier with this version, and it was much easier.  This image was done in about 3 minutes altogether, while others were shuffling their chairs around and trying to get a web meeting started.