Today I went out to Columbia lake (near the University of Waterloo, Ontario) with my friend Ashley, to test out the limits of her old point-and-shoot camera and to see if it is at all possible to get decent quality image out of it that is usable as a PC wallpaper.

I’m not sure yet about her results, but as far as I’m concerned, I decided to only bring my iPhone 4 along. I have heard of other photographers doing entire photo sessions with only an iPhone + post processing, but I had never done it myself. The results are below. I gotta say that the amount of customizing that the iPhone allows, in terms of shutter speed (by tapping on a desired area to meter from and thus locking exposure, which also locks focus on that object), is not ideal; however, if one is stuck with their smart-phone and one needs to shoot …I’d say it is far from a hopeless situation.

Technical: oh the iPhone I used the native camera app with the HDR function on (for most images), as well as the Hipstamatic App (Loftus lens + Blanko Freedom 13 Film). Otherwise, the images were loaded into Gimp 2.8, processed and resized. Gimp processing involved different things for some of them; some colour channel tweaks, but mostly just Colour Curves (changing the blue curve to yield more golden light tones) and Levels.