iPhone Photography - Professional Photography in Your Pocket

iPhone photography, or iPhoneography is becoming more and more legit and there are already 'professional iPhoneographers' out there like Max Berkowitz and Daniel K. Berman, whose photos are available for printing at home, ordering post cards as well as framed images. The obvious advantage of iPhoneography is that it counts as photography while clicking and editing pictures takes a total of five minutes.

Every iPhoneographer has their list of favourite applications but here are a few to get you started. None of these need you to be a professional photographer or know every single photography term, but they do require you to have a basic sense of aesthetics, shot composition and above all, fun. I'm warning you though, some of these apps tend to burn a hole in the wallet but hey, this way's a lot cheaper than shelling out on an SLR and editing software.

The Touted Basic - Hipstamatic
Hipstamatic (if you haven't heard about it already) is an application that gives your photos a vintage effect through a variety of in-application lenses, film stock and flash options. The application itself costs $1.99 (Rs. 89.71) and comes with 3 lenses, 2 types of film and 2 types of flash. Additional Hipstapaks can be bought for 99 cents. Despite the cash-cow-ness of the application, it's pretty good to use to get started with iPhoneography. Here's a tip, the John S lens works well when you're shooting a well lit picture, while the Kaimal lens works well in darker situations, particularly bars and other indoor dark places. Here's another tip (can you handle your lucky day?), Lo-Mob (also $1.99, Rs. 89.71) is a nice alternative to Hipstamatic, adding vintage effects to your pictures. However, Hipstamatic promises you the experience of actually taking a picture from a vintage camera, i.e. it's not an editing program. You take the picture after you choose the effect.

Fun With Crayons - ColorSplash
Colorsplash is a super fun application that allows you to manipulate the colour scheme of your pictures. It sells for 99 cents (Rs. 44.63) and can be used both on the iPhone and  the iPad. Basically what the application does is converts your entire picture into black and white and you paint the parts of the picture you want in colour with your finger. Of course, they've thought of us chubby knob folk and added a zoom in feature so you can be more specific with your paint job. Another app that's like ColorSplash and is free is DashOfColor. With this app, you can't zoom in but you change the brush size with which you're painting (in ColorSplash, the size of your brush is the size of your finger). It's more difficult to be accurate with this app but it gets the job done. Regardless, I'm still a fan of ColorSplash.

I also found an awesome iPad-only colour manipulation app, Color Blast HD. With it, you can manipulate the colours of your pictures without defaulting to only colouring from black and white. You can also change the colour of specific objects in your pictures with this app. Needless to say, I cannot wait to find its equivalent for the iPhone. 

Want An Effect? That Have It All - FX Photo Studio
FX Photo Studio literally has 181 different effects you can add to your pictures. And there are more in-app effects you can buy for 99 cents (Rs. 44.63) (although, will you really need them?). What's doubly awesome about it is you can double up, triple or even 181-ple up effects on any picture. The application itself costs 99 cents (Rs. 44.63) and can be used on both the iPhone and iPad. This application is also cool because the developers behind it, MacPhun, LLC promotes iPhoneography (and their app of course) with contests organized by professional iPhoneographers and with chances to win some pretty neat prizes (that is if you consider a Macbook and a $50 gift card to the App Store neat).

There are a ton of other applications that offer you various effects for your pictures but I find this one pretty damn comprehensive. However, another application I recommend for effects, as well as its sharing ability is Instagram. Instagram is free and has a picture sharing network, a lot like Twitpic from which you can also directly post to social networking sites. Some of their effects like X-pro II and Lomo-fi are pretty awesome and something I like to do is double-up Instagram on a picture that I've already put through either ColorSplash, TiltShift (mentioned later) or even Phoster (mentioned even later).