Shooting your vacation, the iPhone 4 way: Pt 1

A guest post by Mike Smithwick, author of Distant Suns 3 for the iPhone/iPad and blogger at distantsuns.com. Mike is a seasoned iPhone/iPad developer who has developed numerous iPhone applications. He has recently released Distant Suns 3. Follow Mike’s work on Twitter for more information.

So I was on my way to South America last week for the July 11 eclipse, and a funny (as in really stupid funny) thing happened to me. I left $600 of camera gear in the men’s restroom. Fifteen minutes later when I discovered this little jewel in the crown of stupidity, my new Canon ELPH, and relatively new Canon SX10IS had vanished to the hands of some lucky, bas….er, “fortunate traveler.”

As a longtime amateur photographer, I always yearn (yes, yearn) for great opportunities to shoot stuff…with a camera that is! And now I had none…oops, wait a minute there Bunky, I have my trusty new iPhone 4!

So this was going to be an iPhone 4 expedition only. A few years ago I sniffed at people whipping out their Razrs or similar class phones to shoot once-in-a-lifetime photos…now I had to be one. Grrr. Except the quality of the built in phone cameras are much better now, and the iPhone 4 is no exception. So I thought maybe I should document this to show how capable the little camera is. Note that WordPress does compress images quite a lot, so these will have some noticeable compression artifacts when displayed full size.

The expedition started with a 3 day side jaunt to Chile’s Easter Island, otherwise known as the place of those “damned creepy giant heads.”

Besides being loaded down with my iPhone 4, I had a small Celestron Firstscope to examine the southern skies. Unfortunately, said skies were clouded over most of the time so I only caught a quick glimpse of the famous Omega Centauri globular cluster from off the balcony of our hotel. Read more…