#anticrop

It had been a while since I got that wide-eyed schoolboy wonderment at what an app can do. When I started out doing iphoneography, I used to get it with almost every new app. But yesterday I discovered a new app that gave me that same old buzz. It was featured on Guy Yang's excellent iPhone Camera Essentials and is called Anti-Crop. What it does is uncrop a picture. Uncrop you say? What if you didn't crop the picture to start with? Not a problem. Well, imagine a rectangular landscape photo of a golf course. You can turn it into a square picture (good for Instagram) by adding in some sky in the top of the picture or perhaps a bit of grass at the bottom. Miraculously the app analyses the picture to see what might go well and it adds it in. Technically, it's called a "content aware" function. I tried it out and, yes, before your very eyes, it does exactly that. You can hardly see the join. Quite amazing. It reminded me of my amazement when I first saw the things that apps like Touch Retouch and Filter Storm could do. Last week in my class one of my students said: "I'm completely bewildered by all the things you can do with a photo now. I don't know where to start." And it's true. All the apps available for the iPhone camera give you a huge range of creative possibilities. And as I've said before, these apps are what characterises photography with the iPhone. The iPhone is not only a capture device, it's also a crafting device. But the iPhone and its apps are tools to serve our creative visions. You want more sky, you want more grass, you got it. But don't forget, pictures of golf courses can be a bit boring.