ZionQuest from GeoQuestTech.com is one of the reference applications that grip you immediately. Trust me, you will spend much more time with it than you had planned to initially.

As the name implies, ZionQuest covers the Zion National Park. The 200MB download is an early indication that you are in for a treat and the application does not disappoint. It is an in-depth guide to all aspects of Zion National Park and it is as helpful in planning your trip as it is once you are there.

Maps of the park and its plentiful attractions help with the initial orientation. Descriptions of individual walks include many photos and video segments

Once installed, start exploring its many features. Among them are:

• Custom, interactive map of Zion National Park, showing tour locations and popular hiking trails.
• Dozens of exclusive videos describing the various hiking trails, popular tour locations, all shuttle bus stops in Zion National Park
• Hundreds of photos of Zion National Park organized by location
• Trail guides with detailed trail information
• A trip planner that includes; Park fees, Park Seasons and Hours, Shuttle System, Permit Requirements, Activities for Kids, Ranger-lead Activities, Weather and Climate, and Camping details and locations.
• Detailed information about the park shuttle system with Springdale shuttle system map, shuttle system hints and tips.
• Many other features

Detailed descriptions of a hike and a very good trail guide help you to find your way around Zion National Park

Overall, I was amazed and blown away by the many details I found in this app. Being no stranger to the Zion National Park (Joe and I visited it a few years ago), we recognized many of the different places we had been, some of the trails we had hiked and many of the landmarks we had photographed. In retrospect I wish I had this app with me, since our experience would have been even better. So if you plan to go to Zion National Park, this app is a must for you.

The only downside: It does not include a topographic map at the detail level that Tom Harrison’s maps have (see our review) But then you cannot get everything in life and certainly not at the price this app sells for.

Our verdict: Highly recommended and an easy Editor’s Pick!

Price: $4.99 from iTunes.

Recently, a number of photography luminaries such as Scott Bourne suggested that we will see DSLR camera manufacturers adopt Apple’s touch-to-expose/focus user interface that they rolled out in the new iPhone 3GS. Not only do I agree, I think this will not be limited to DSLRs nor to just the way Apple implemented touch on the iPhone. Despite a touch-screen LCD being more expensive than a regular LCD, we will see this technology initially not only in DSLRs (maybe not entry-level DSLRs), but also in high-end point&shoots (Canon’s G10 would be one example) as well as the new micro 3/4 cameras (DSLR-like systems without mirror, thus smaller form factors) such as the Olympus PEN P-E1 and the Panasonic DMC-G1. In fact, Panasonic with its history of aggressively pushing technical innovation would be the prime candidate for rapidly rolling out touch-screen LCDs.

If I was the product manager for Panasonic’s micro four third cameras, here’s what I would tell my engineers to work on:

Single-Tap to Focus and Expose
Simply copy Apple’s functionality. Tap to focus, set exposure and white balance. Watch out for patents and don’t worry too much about improvements – this needs to be (only) as good as Apple’s iPhone implementation.

Double-Tap to Spotmeter, then Focus
Traditionally, you point your camera’s center to where you want to spotmeter, half press the shutter, press the AE Lock (”*”) button on your camera, recompose, then half-press the shutter again to focus. This 1-2 operation could easily be implemented through a touch screen – simply tap first where you want to expose, then second to where you want to focus. Much easier without the need to recompose, which is cumbersome esp. when you shoot from a tripod.

Triple-Tap to HDR
HDR will go in-camera. While creating the actual HDR image might stay off-camera for a while longer (at least in professional cameras), making it easier to shoot multiple images for HDR will be advanced from where it is today. With a touch-screen LCD, simply tap on the three spots on the screen that you want to expose to for highlights, mid-tones and lowlights, then let the software compute the stops and how many shots to take.

Hover to Zoom
Similarly to the iPhone where hovering over text brings up the zoom loupe, tap and hover a spot on the screen and the camera zooms into that spot. This would be display only, not for composition, so the actual zoom on the lens would not be invoked. This would work for both live-view (before taking the shot, so you can check on details, sharpness…) and viewing an image after the shot.

And then there is the matter of using the iPhone as a remote to our cameras, but that will be covered in another post!

One of the downsides of the iPhone camera is that it is a fixed length lens. There’s no optical zoom – instead, you have to crop on your iPhone or PC/Mac for a zoom effect or use a digital zoom application such as Camera Zoom, with the typical problem of a digital zoom that its use results in degraded image quality.

We recently found some optical lenses for the iPhone, by a company called USBfever. They graciously provided us with a sample of their 2x Tele Zoom. Here are my thoughts about it:

Attaching the lens
It is very simple to “mount” the lens on the iPhone. It comes with two small magnetic rings with self-adhesive tape. Simply glue one of them around the lens of your iPhone and then “snap” the lens (actually, any of their lenses) on the iPhone. The magnet does a good job holding the lens in place. To unmount, pull off the lens, attach the lens cap and bottom. Done!

Using the lens
The lens is made of sturdy aluminum and since it is attached through a magnet, you can slide the lens around on the magnet for optimal coverage. One issue: Since it is round, it heavily vignettes (see screen shot below). There is no way to avoid this – I guess it would have been possible to construct optics to avoid vignetting, but that typically includes multiple lens elements and drives up the cost and weight of the lens. Vignetting can simply be cropped in post processing.

Vignetting very visible with 2x Tele lens

Optical Quality
The quality of the optics is surprisingly good given the low cost of the lens. I did not see any quality degradation. On the contrary, as the comparison image below exemplifies, there’s a lot more detail visible in the 100% crop from the image shot with the 2x telephoto than is in the regular image.

100% crops: The tele lens brings out the details nicely

Cleaning
The lens is small, but can be cleaned easily with swabs or your favorite lens cleaning solution. Personally, I use a LensPen, which works just fine on this lens.

Personally, I prefer optical zooms over digital zooms at any time of the day due to better quality pictures even if it means I have to deal with vignetting. Thus, since the lens is very small and light-weight, I started to carry it around with me in my bag. So far, I’ve used it quite frequently, since it’s so quick and easy to attach it to my iPhone and since I like the quality of the photos that I shot with it.

Verdict: Highly recommended

In addition to the 2x telephoto, USBfever also offers a fish-eye, a 5x tele and a wide-angle lens for the iPhone.

Weight: 6.6 grams, including lens cap and strap

Price: $16.99, directly from USBfever

I’m not a big fan of iPhone cases (add too much bulk), but if I had one, it would probably be the Griffin Clarifi. Why? Because it has a little built-in macro lens that can be moved over the iPhone lens. With Clarifi, you have a better chance at taking good and sharp close-ups and macros, since the slide-on lens reduces the closest focus range for the iPhone camera from 18 to 4.1 inches. This is especially useful for barcode and text photography or for some of the uses that are outlined in our post about other uses for the iPhone camera.

The Clarifi case is constructed of polycarbonate with access to power switch, headphone jack, volume controls and features Griffin’s EasyDock; remove the case bottom to charge and sync, put it back on when you’re ready to go.

Price: $34.99, Amazon: $21.00

We recently launched our sister blog, called iPhonePhotoVideo.com. There we will cover all things photography on the iPhone, from iPhone trends to taking and editing photos on the iPhone to companion apps, little iPhone helper applications that aid you with your photography regardless of the camera you use. And much more!

Check it out or better, subscribe to it!

If you carry an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you also carry a great platform for displaying your artwork. While photographers such as Scott Bourne claim that they sold artwork straight after showing it on their iPhone, this has never happened to me. But I’ve shown my images in a number of casual settings, often by accident, since the topic just came up. Thus, it pays (literally and figuratively) to be prepared.

So how do you best showcase your artwork on an iPhone? Here are some tips:

Resize your images: The iPhone’s native resolution is 480 x 320 pixels at 163ppi. Since it allows you to zoom in, I resize my images to 960 x 640 pixels at 163ppi. You could make them even bigger, but since the iPhone’s storage space is limited, there’s a tradeoff between better resolution and more images.

Create portfolios: Similar to any showing of your artwork, create portfolios centering around subjects, trips or events, then pick only the best images. Store these as separte portfolios, then transfer them to your iPhone. When you show your artwork in a more ad-hoc or casual setting, people don’t have the time to look at 300 pictures. Thus, I typically pick between 10 and 20 pictures for a portfolio.

Adjust for the iPhone screen: The iPhone screen is not color-calibrated and to my eye, it’s very contrasty. Thus, I have to adjust my images, so they display at their best on the iPhone. Unfortunately, this is a manual process – there’s no one-setting-fits-all slider, button or action you can use in Photoshop. However, if you use a sequence of images in a portfolio that were all taken under similar lighting conditions, Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom make it easy to apply adjustments to a set of images, so you do not have to do this manually for every single image.

What other tricks do you use to best show your images on an iPhone?

LaCie’s Rugged external hard drive series has long been a favorite for many photographers. Despite the dorky orange color, they are offered with single (USB) and triple (USB, Firewire 400 and 800) interface, can be operated in bus-powered mode, are fast and hold lots of pictures with capacities up to 500GB.

Recently, LaCie announced the LaCie Rugged XL hard drive with a capacity of 1TB. Suited for speed-intensive applications or for large-scale backups, the LaCie Rugged XL is compatible with both Mac and PC environments. In addition, it supports two key interfaces: Hi-Speed USB for universal compatibility, and the extreme speed of eSATA 3Gb/s. The new drive also includes a complete software bundle for easy formatting with LaCie Setup Assistant, as well as Genie Backup Assistant software for Windows users and Intego Backup Assistant software for Mac users.

Price:
LaCie Rugged 500GB: 165.99, Amazon: 147.99
LaCie Rugged XL: to be announced

Let’s face it – a lot of pictures taken with an iPhone and posted straight to Flickr or Facebook don’t look very good. But help is available for some quick adjustments through Tiffen’s Photo Fx. Simply take a picture, open Photo Fx, choose one of the 26 filters, use the sliders on the bottom to make your adjustments, then save the picture before posting it. It is a very simple and quick process which can yield quite dramatic improvements over your straight-out-of-your-iPhone pictures. Also handy is their before/after toggle, so you can always compare how the improvements look over the original. Of course, you can apply multiple filters on the same picture.

Supported filters include: Black and White, Black Pro-Mist®, Center Spot, Color-Grad® , Color Spot, Day for Night, Enhancer, Fog, Glow, Halo, High Contrast, Infrared, Looks, Night Vision, Old Photo, Polarizer, Pro-Mist®, Reflector, Star, Soft/FX®, Tint, Two Strip, Three Strip, Ultra Contrast and Vignette.

Our verdict: Highly recommended!

Price: $2.99 (introductory), later $3.99

CameraBits released version 4.6 of its popular PhotoMechanic software from beta at PMA today. The long list of changes since 4.5.x include a slick folder-watching Live Ingest function, a full-resolution loupe in the Contact Sheet view, additional upload templates for Amazon S3, Flickr, SmugMug and others, expanded GPS support, an option to export all program preferences for import into Photo Mechanic on another computer and much, much more. It is still very good at fast imports of images from your camera to a PC or a Mac. In addition, it allows for quick sorting, tagging and the creation of contact sheets in a color managed environment. The new version also adds support for the latest DSLRs.

Price: $150

Today, SanDisk announced the release of new versions of its popular ImageMate card reader line, featuring higher transfer speed, upgraded software applications and smaller and sleeker designs.

The All-In-One memory card reader can reach speeds of up to 34 megabytes per second (MB/s)1 when using a SanDisk Extreme® IV 45MB/s CompactFlash® card, and the Multi-Card reader is capable of up to 30MB/s2 read and 27 MB/s write data transfer rates when using a SanDisk Extreme® III 30MB/s Edition SDHC™ card. Sporting a stylish glossy black and metallic silver design, each reader’s tripod base is detachable, creating instant portability. In addition, SanDisk’s updated ImageMate software bundle enables customers to utilize the advanced features of both readers, simplifying the most common tasks that they want to perform—transferring photos to a PC, archiving and sharing them.

Having had very good experiences with previous versions of the ImageMate, we will acquire some and post a Field Tested review!

Price starting at $20, Amazon from $14.60