Digital Photography

Got an App Idea? Think Outside the Box - and Outside the Country

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If you are considering building an app, one of the many things you need to consider is the international market. Thinking internationally, rather than just locally (here in the US), will probably influence some of your content/feature/benefit decisions.

As always, an important rule in marketing is this: know your customer - and your potential customer.

Dr. Dave Wilson, the app developer who designed my app, 24-7 Photo Buffet, uses a program called AppVis to track not only our sales, but where the app is sold. Today's Region Graph of sales opens this post.

Summing up the marketing tip: Sure, think outside the box, but also think outside the country!

If you are interested in developing an app, here's a short how-to by Dr. Dave. Take it away, Dave . . . .

I'm the dude who co-developed "Rick Sammon's 24/7 Photo Buffet" iPhone/iTouch application. Good fun – but also a lot of work.

Actually, the app is more like an e-book - because it offers so much how-to info.

What's more, it's like an ever-expanding e-book – because new content will be added monthly. More fun . . . and more work :-)

For those of you who are interested in behind-the-scenes stories (and app development), here's the technical scoop on the app.

In the Beginning

Apple started shipping the first iPhone in June 2007. There was, however, a problem for developers (like me): Apple didn't initially provide any way to write "native" apps for the iPhone.

Apple finally released their iPhone SDK to developers in March of 2008, and opened the App Store in July 2008. Developers could finally write real apps, and sell them to iphone and iPod Touch owners. This started the "Gold Rush" that today has produced more than 100,000 apps for sale in the App Store - in more than 70 countries.

What’s Needed

To write an app for the iPhone, you need the following:

• Apple's Xcode development system - a free download.

• A good understanding of "object-oriented programming" (OOP). This can be hard to learn at first, but I started using OOP in 1987, so it was no problem by 2008.

• Familiarity with the Objective-C programming language, which uses a C syntax for most things, but a Smalltalk-like syntax for sending messages to objects. I had not used Objective-C since the late '80s, so I had to re-learn it. It's a cool programming language, but only Apple seems to use it. Most of the rest of the world uses C, C++, C#, or Java - which all differ from Objective-C in various ways.

• The iPhone SDK - a free download. Parts of iPhone programming are just like Mac OS X programming, but there are many new frameworks to support the "Cocoa Touch" user interface, so there's a lot to learn.

• A Developer account with Apple that costs $99/year, just to be able to put an app on your own iPhone for testing.

• An iTunes business account, so you can submit apps to the App Store.

By the time Rick and I met in September 2009 (in a helicopter at the Maui Photo Festival), I had four apps in the App Store. The design and development of "Rick Sammon's 24/7 Photo Buffet" took almost four months.

Assigned Tasks

• Deciding on the content - a four-month process that continues even today.

• Prototyping the user interface - about one month.

• Taking existing iPhone programs I had written, and munging them into what we eventually used - about one month.

• Detailed coding and debugging - perhaps two months.

• Picking a name for the app - weeks of suggestions, counter-suggestions, and brainstorming. This is the hardest part of app development :-)

• Submitting it to the App Store - a touchy process that took about two hours of messing around.

• Waiting for Apple to approve the app - only took three days (this could take weeks in the past - Apple seems to have greatly improved the process in the last few weeks).

About Rick

"Rick Sammon's 24/7 Photo Buffet" incorporates 30+ years of Rick's photography and teaching experience (and his best photographs and techniques), and 30+ years of my programming and user interface design experience. So I guess you could say that this app took more than 60 years to develop. But it was worth it - it's a really cool app. Hey, I'm not the only one who thinks so! Check out our reviews on our app page.

Rick and I want to hear from you. Let us know what topics you'd like us to add as we update the app - which should be at least once a month. You can email Rick at ricksammon at mac.com. You can see more of his work at www.ricksammon.com.

Beware of Banding, Notice the Noise, Forget the Filter & Raw Rules!

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I got the idea for this post after receiving the latest issue of one of my favorite magazines. Great images, as always. However, I was a bit surprised to see that one of the low-light images, great as it was, showed visible and obvious banding.

• • •

One of the reasons why I use a high-end digital SLR (currently the Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 7D) is to get the cleanest possible image, that is, an image with as little noise as possible. I like to keep it clean, so to speak.

In my quest for a clean image, I always shoot Raw files, and use the lowest possible ISO.

In addition, I strive for the best in-camera exposure, trying not to underexpose the image, which can add noise to an image, especially in the shadow areas.

At its worst, underexposing can cause what is called "banding" in a file – an effect in which you can actually see the bands of pixels. Banding, by the way, is exaggerated with JPEG files, which is another reason for shooting Raw files. (But as someone just pointed out (and reminded me) on twitter, you can get banding even with a Raw file if it's poorly exposed and processed.)

I actually don't have a good example of banding because, again, I strive for the best in-camera exposure - always checking the histogram on my camera's LCD monitor. So, in an effort to illustrate banding (and noise), I opened up the shadow areas from one of by Botswana images using Curves. The long white boxes illustrate the most visible bands in the picture, which you probably can't see because it's a low res file.

I used this image to illustrate this point: If you underexpose a file too much and try to open up the shadows, you'll get an image with noise and banding.

About my properly exposed elephant image: check out the tonal range. The sun in not washed out and you can see into some of the shadow areas. This is an example of why I say, "Raw Rules!"

Speaking of noise, if you do have a noisy image, Topaz DeNoise does a great job of reducing it.

On another topic, check out the ghost image of the sun in the top picture. It was actually in the bottom picture, too, but I removed it with the Burn Tool and Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop.

The ghost image was caused by the sun reflecting off the front element of my lens and then bouncing back onto my UV filter. This is when I leaned that you gotta remove all filters when shooting into the sun :-)

Explore the light,
Rick

Two of My Favorite Discs

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Fred Morrison, the inventor of the flying disc we know as the Frisbee, died earlier this month at the age of 90. He was a cool dude.

The Frisbee is still one of my favorite discs; lots of fun to toss around.

Another one of my favorite discs is the ExpoDisc – basically a custom white balancing device that fits over your lens like a filter.

The ExpoDisc is also fun to use, because it helps me get accurate skin tones of the strangers that I photograph in strange lands - like this Tariano woman who I photographed on a trip to Brazil. Oh yeah, I also use it closer to home to photographed family and friends.

I could tell you how easy it is to use the ExpoDisc, as well as why it's important, but my friends Eddie Tapp and Judy Host (among other pros) do a great job here.

Explore the Light,
Rick
P.S. Here are some more pictures and some info from that Brazil trip.

24/7 Photo Safari App Being Developed

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Dr. Dave Wilson and I are currently developing our next app: Rick Sammon's 24/7 Photo Safari.

The app, due out in May, is divided into six text/photo sections:

• Wildlife

• Captive Animals

• People

• Landscapes

• Cityscapes

• Underwater

There is also a section that features five Photoshop movies:

• Creating the Panning Effect

• Faking the Full-Frame Fish-eye Lens Effect

• Saving a Back-lit Shot

• Simulating Rear-curtain Synch

• Wow Them With the Telephoto Lens Effect

In our Help section, you can read about the team that assembled the app. While you are there, you can also check out some links and make suggestions for this app and future Rick Sammon 24/7 apps.

Hey! If you have a suggestion for an app, let me know here.

Explore the light,

Rick