Gabriel Ponzanelli Photography

Today I decided to start a Project 365. I started a new blog using Posterous where I'll be posting a daily photograph taken and edited in my iPhone. I don't know exactly why I decided to do it, as nothing really happened to make me think about it or anything. I wanted to check out Posterous and for some reason thought this would be a good idea for it. I set it up to automatically post to my Flickr photostream and my Twitter account.

I've read about this type of project from other sites in the past. I think the first was Photojojo a long time ago, it sounded interesting and I actually toyed with the idea of it for a while, but nothing really came of it. At the time I had a Sony Ericsson phone and it just wasn't as much fun as a camera. Now I love my iPhone and I'm a bit obsessed with using it for photography and have been posting my iPhone photographs regularly, so it's time to just go for it. Inspiration also came from Chase Jarvis, a commercial photographer that has a really interesting and inspirational blog and is an avid iPhone-photographer.

The photo above is day 1. Today. I was at work and just grabbed this magnetic thing and shot it quickly to get something up. Not really good, but if I'm posting a photo a day for a year it's pretty much a given that some will be crap, which is actually kind of liberating.

My Project 365 blog is here. We'll see where this goes.

Regular readers will no doubt know that I enjoy taking photographs with my iPhone. I've reviewed and recommended a few apps that I use on a regular basis, and will continue to do so as I find new ones. You could even call it a bit of an obsession. I'm sure I've spent more money on photography apps than on any other, and I'm perfectly happy about that. The iPhone is a great toy, and as others that are also into iPhone photography say, it could very well be your best camera as it's the one that's always with you. Many of the apps are great and truly enhance what you can do with the little camera.

However, I have a major complaint. Since the iPhone 3GS was released with a whooping 3 Megapixels, very few apps have been updated to save back edited photographs at full resolution. This, to me, is unacceptable. Yes, I know that extra megapixel doesn't mean much and more megapixels doesn't equal better quality, but still. Maybe it's just me, but I find it really frustrating to take a photograph at 2048x1536 (3GS full resolution) and then get it saved at 1600x1200 or lower once I apply an effect. I know editing photographs is memory intensive and can cause apps to crash, but if some developers have done it successfully there's no excuse. Developers need to keep up with technology and since it's been over 2 months since the iPhone 3GS was launched, I find myself no longer using apps that don't save at full resolution. I've been thinking of just deleting them from my iPhone as I have way too many anyway as it is.

Let this post serve as a call to all developers of photography iPhone apps. Update your apps to take advantage of the full capabilities of the current iPhone or risk falling into oblivion.

As I was writing this I just checked if there were any updates and I'm very happy to say that Photogene (one of my favourites) was updated yesterday to support the 3GS full resolution. So credit to the developers.

UPDATE: Photo FX by Tiffen also saves at full iPhone 3GS resolution.

UPDATE 2: Finally, after a very, very long time, CameraBag now saves at full res. I'm using it again quite often.