Alain Briot Viewfinder – New iPhoneography App
Whether you’re a cinematographer, photographer, or even a painter, chances are good that you use some type of viewfinder to help visualize your subject. Maybe you like a professional grade director’s viewfinder, or perhaps you’re a little more old school and prefer an old fashioned cardboard cutout. With Viewfinder, you can have the best of both worlds in a single powerful, highly customizable, easy to use iPhone app.
Use Viewfinder to quickly and easily compose your shot, choose your focal length, and a lot more before you ever reach for your equipment bag. It is the perfect companion for location scouting and for concept shoots. It makes so much easier to determine what equipment to bring to the actual shoot.
This app supports nearly every digital or film based camera on the market, including all major brands of 4/3, 35mm, medium and large format still cameras and backs, as well as lenses from most manufacturers; so you can be sure that you’ll find your equipment there. Generic formats like 35mm and 4×5 allows to use your cameras even it’s not listed by manufacturer.
Viewfinder is designed to be a highly customizable professional tool, so you can define your own sensor or film formats and lens focal lengths. Even the function buttons are customizable to reflect your needs and working style. You can save up to four different camera setups and switching between them is as easy as tapping a button.
The gesture based controls couldn’t be easier to use. Tap inside a frame to dim the surroundings, and you have a simulated cardboard cutout. Just swipe across the screen to return to normal view. Double tap the screen to activate auto-focus and auto-exposure, a unique feature of Viewfinder that makes it much easier to cope with difficult lighting conditions. Pinch to zoom in up to 5x to see how longer focal lengths will look or zoom out to 0.7x to see what focal lengths are just outside of the iPhone camera’s capabilities.
If you shoot wide angles, you’ve probably been disappointed when you looked for wide angle features. The iPhone’s camera has a focal length that’s about the same as a 35mm lens (iPhone 4 goes down to about 28mm) on a full frame 35mm camera, and that severely limits most viewfinder apps. In fact, they just can’t handle wide angles so popular with landscape photography at all. But that’s not a problem for Viewfinder. This is the only app in the App Store that supports wide angle adapters (we like and recommend the OWLE). Just tap the WIDE key, select the adapter that you’re using, and go where no viewfinder app has gone before.
Here are some of the features that make Viewfinder the best app of its kind:
★ Support for generic camera formats in case your camera is not on the list.
★ Three user-defined custom lens focal lengths per camera in case your lens is not listed.
★ Support for up to five custom film/sensor formats for medium and large format cameras. You can work with the exact image size your camera produces!
★ In addition to the native camera aspect ratio you can compose with 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 1:1 and HD (16:9) if your camera supports HD video.
★ Support for iPhone wide angle adapters, such as the OWLE.
★ You can save the current view as a photo. GPS coordinates and non-native aspect ratios are recorded on saved images.
★ Digital zoom in the range of 0.7x – 5x.
★ When you zoom smaller than 100% a virtual frame appears so you can see what’s just outside of the largest frame the iPhone camera could record.
★ Simulate cardboard cutout finder by dimming the space outside of the selected lens frame lines.
★ Auto-focus and auto-exposure on the iPhone 3GS and 4.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
