I shot this image of a silhouetted cowboy and a horse at sunset over a year ago. At the time thought is was kind of cool, so I shared it on Flickr. A year later, I received an email from Penguin saying they’d found my image on Flickr and would like to use it for the cover of a new book! Yesterday, a cheque in the mail arrived. It’s my very first book cover!

What shocked me was that somebody actually paid me real money for a experimental shot that I took for fun and for free. I wanted to share this story with you because it really hammered home some really important points about the nature of the photography business in this new digital and social age and all the things that are possible for someone with no training, little money, and a strong passion for taking great photos.

1. You can get great shots with any camera: I shot this with my trusty Canon Rebel Xti (400D) with a basic kit lens. The quality was good enough to print. Never let your gear limit you, instead learn to master what you’ve got and try to the best possible images you can.
2. Even iPhone shots are good enough to print: We are seeing more and more publications accept images shot with an iPhone. The most recent MacWorld Cover was shot with an iPhone 4. F-Stoppers shot an entire fashion shoot with a 3GS. Additionally, when I was reporting on the 2010 Olympics for the Vancouver newspaper, The Province, they posted an iPhone 3G photo taken of me and a very large fry on the front page of the paper. They continued to use my iPhone shots in the paper many times.
3. The more you shoot, the more you learn, the better you get: I feel like I’ve come a long way since that cowboy shoot and if it weren’t for that photo session and the many sessions after that, I wouldn’t be able to take the shots I take now. I honestly didn’t have a clue how to do anything technical when I started out. I often made big mistakes and taken crummy photos. Instead of feeling bad when you take a poor photo, analyze it and try to figure out why it’s poor and how you can improve your skills for next time.
4. Most learning happens by “just doing it”: I haven’t taken a single photography class or read a photography related book cover to cover. I learnt everything I know by doing and doing until I got it right. When I couldn’t figure something out something technical, I’d call other photographers, connect on Flickr, or dive into Strobist for a week.
   
5. Other photographers are your greatest allies: Whenever I meet another photographer like Ken (pictured on left) and Scott (right), I completely barrage them with questions about gear, lighting, techniques, etc. I find most photographers are completely open to sharing information and are wonderful shoulders to cry on when you are lacking inspiration. You can meet tons of photogs on Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. Share your ideas, go for photo walks and garner inspiration from them.
6. Believe in yourself and your photographic abilities: We all have bad days, unproductive days, but it’s the people that keep plodding through the difficult times that end up succeeding. I’m very hard on myself and my photography, and sometimes I’ve completely abandoned it for months because I didn’t feel like my shots were good enough. Now, if I’m having a bad day with my 5DMKII, I’ll switch things up and shoot with my iPhone. I find by taking the pressure off and just shooting for fun, I can overcome a lot of my self-critical negativity. At the end of the day, we shoot because we love photography, not to create perfect images.
7. Share your photos: If I hadn’t uploaded that cowboy photo to Flickr, Penguin would have never found it. It’s that simple. The greater distribution your photos have, the more people will see them and the greater opportunities you have to publish or sell your images. So start sharing your shots! Plus, it really helps to have others both praise and criticize your work.
8. You can make money with your photography: It’s not easy, but it’s definitely within your grasp. I did it with no training, just hard work and perseverance and so can you! I’m going to do an expanded post on this topic soon, because I know what a battle it is to get paid for professional photography work when everyone’s Uncle Jim considers themselves a Pro photographer.

Until then start with Step One: Get out and shoot. Step Two: Share your photos! I want to see everyone posting pictures on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr & their blogs. Can’t wait to see your shots!!

The newest version of Camera+ offers some powerful tools to take great shots with your iPhone. I’ve seen some breathtaking shots from budding iPhoneographers through our weekly photo contests.

In this video tutorial, I demo some creative ways you can use our new Camera features, Touch Focus and Touch Exposure, to take your iPhone photos to a whole new level. I can’t wait to see your photos!

Link me to any of your great shots on this post!

When I was in SF for WWDC in June, I made the trek up to the TWiT Cottage in Petaluma to film an episode of MacBreak Weekly entitled “Harry Potter”. I always find the cottage such a cool place, so I thought I’d make a brief behind-the-scenes tour to share with you.

Special appearances by Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, a camera shy Don McAllister, Alex Lindsay, Sarah Lane, Tom Merrit, super-edit Tony.

Thanks to Andy Inhatko for jumping in as camera man. :)

Since it’s summertime, I thought I’d do a video tutorial this week on how to take great beach photos with your iPhone since dSLRs don’t seem to like sand and water too much :(

This week’s contest theme: Beach Photos

The second contest’s theme is beach photos. Any images taken on or near a beach will be considered for the contest. Photos must be taken with the iPhone using the Camera+ app.

Here are the contest details:

1. Follow me, @mostlylisa on Twitter.
2. Share your photos on Twitter using the Camera+ Share button and include the hashtag #MLPhotoContest in your tweet so we can find you.
3. The contest ends July 15th, 2010 at midnight EDT.

There is no restriction to the number of entries, so feel free to enter as many times as you like! I will announce the winner on Friday, July 16th, 2010.

This week’s winner will receive a $100 iTunes Gift Certificate.

Congratulations to last week’s winner Kalle Oksa for his awesome Kullaberg landscape shot.

This blog redesign was painfully long over due. No more giant Lisa header. Yay!! Thank you so much to my tap tap tap colleagues for whipping this up in a few days.

Designed by the incomparable Wolfgang Bartelme, who did all the amazing design work for Camera, both in-app and all the promo pages. He obviously used my love of bokeh as a theme and I couldn’t be more happy with this design.

WP Theme, coding and moral support by Scott Meinzer, who gave up hours of sleep and trips to the Cheescake factory to finish my blog.

I feel really inspired to start filling this blog with more photos, video and a lot more love than I’ve given it in the past few months. Hope you like it as much as I do!

My video tutorial this week focuses on how to take great landscape photos with your iPhone. I will be running another Mostly Lisa Photo of the Week contest to encourage you to share your best Camera+ photo and win great prizes.

Jump to Contest details.

Kitsilano Beach. FX: Redscale.

1. Shoot during Sunrise or Sunset

The quality of light is one of the most important things in great scenery shots. Ideally, you want to shoot landscapes either at sunrise or sunset when the light is the most even and the colours are the most brilliant. Try to avoid shooting in harsh, high-contrast light around mid-day. 

Scene Mode: Sunset, FX: Miniaturize

My favourite time to shoot is magic hour — the hour right before sunset when the light is soft and golden. This is the ultimate time to capture silhouette and lens flare shots. It’s actually quite impressive how well the iPhone deals with this kind of light. I’ve been really surprised with the lens flare shots I’ve captured with my iPhone. Plus, it is way less stressful taking your iPhone to the beach versus your expensive dSLR.

2. Exposing your shot

Setting the exposure on an iPhone is very finicky. If you tap and correctly expose for the sky (under exposing the land or sea), you get a much more balanced image than if you expose for the land/sea and blow out your sky. It’s much easier to fix under exposure than blow out. If you are using Camera+ (which you should because it’s awesome :P), you can auto correct poor exposures using any of the scene modes and add a touch of awesome with the FXs modes.

FX: HDR

3. Compose the whole frame

When you compose your shot make sure that the edges of your frame are as strong as the centre. Watch for any distracting elements protruding into your shot like tree branches, power lines, or that guy that always manages to walk into your shot and ruin it. If you can’t avoid getting distracting guy into your shot, then make sure to crop him out of your final picture.

Blue Heron. FX: Cross Process

4. Demonstrate a sense of scale

Without a reference point, majestic mountains can lose their grandeur, so make sure you frame in a reference point of scale. Buildings, people, sailboats all add a sense of scale to landscape photos.

5. Rule of thirds

Great landscape photos almost always follow the rule of thirds. This golden rule of photography is easy to implement using a 3×3 grid in camera mode. Instead of placing the horizon in the middle of the frame, place it off centre at one of intersection points. I like to use the power points in the top right or bottom left. Also, adding a foreground element can also add a greater depth to your photos.

Kitsilano Picnic. Scene Mode: Sunset.

With that being said. anything is possible with iPhone photography so get out there, break all the rules and have fun!

The first step to taking great photos is getting outside and taking a lot photos. I know it’s scary to step away from your Apple control station and out into the cruel world, but I know you can do it. We can do it together.

1. Capture the Big Picture

When you arrive at a location try to take a picture that captures the entire scene. Take a step back and try to compose your shot so that you get all the action in one shot.

Empire State, FX: Hipster + Vintage border.

2. Take a lot of pictures.

This seems like an obvious point, but I meet a lot of people who only take one or two shots of at a time and wonder why they didn’t get a great shot. To give you some perspective, I took over 500 photos a day on my recent trip to New York. In the 500, I probably got 20 great photos and the rest were meh.

The Situation :P, FX: Sunkiss’d + thin white border.

3. Pay Attention to Details

Street photography is all about capturing quirky, candid and unexpected shots. This is why it’s almost better to shoot with your iPhone, instead of your dSLR. You can sneak shots in almost anywhere when you are taking it with an iPhone. Try the same thing with a professional dSLR and feel the wrath of angry shop owners, pedestrians and over-protective dog owners :P

King Kong is sad :( FX: So Emo.

4. Compose your shots

Taxi! FX: Redscale.

Composing your images is the key to getting images. With the iPhone you don’t have to worry about setting your aperture, shutter speed or white balance, so it’s the perfect opportunity to focus solely on the composition of your shots.

5. Process your images

Ice Cream, FX: Vibrant.

Before I started working on Camera+, I used to process a lot of my iPhone pictures in Photoshop. No joke, I’m that much of a control freak :P Now I just tap the one-touch FXs and share directly from my iPhone to Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. Obviously I’m biased since I made the FXs, but I’m having so much fun adding them to my photos. I can’t wait to see your shots!

I am starting a Mostly Lisa Photo of the Week contest to encourage you to share your best Camera+ photo and win great prizes!!

The first contest’s theme is street photography. Any images taken outside in urban environments will be considered for the contest. Photos must be taken with the iPhone using the Camera+ app.

Here are the contest details:

1. Follow me, @mostlylisa on Twitter.
2. Share your photos on Twitter using the Camera+ Share button and include the hashtag #MLPhotoContest in your tweet so we can find you.
3. The contest ends June 22, 2010 at midnight EDT.

There is no restriction to the number of entries, so feel free to enter as many times as you like! I will announce the winner on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010.

This week’s winner will receive a $100 iTunes Gift Certificate.

I can’t wait to see your shots!

How to Take Great Street Photography with your iPhone Using Camera+ from Lisa Bettany on Vimeo.

I’m just about to fall asleep for the first time in 41 hours. The launch of Camera+, the iPhone photo App I’ve been working on with Taptaptap, coupled with iPhone 4  buzz, the AT&T fail, and general WWDC pandemonium.

I just wanted to let everyone, especially budding photographers, about this ridiculous promotion we are doing for Camera+  to win my dream camera rig (valued at over $10,000).

It will physically hurt me to give this amazing gear away, but they are making me… boo hiss.

Good luck to all of you. I really hope one of you wins! *fingers crossed*

Best iPhone Camera App Ever and my first App ; )

Camera+, the App that I’ve been working on for over a year, is now available in the App Store.

Woooo! *does a happy dance*

If you’ve been following my Twitter, Tumblr or Flickr stream, you’ve probably noticed a lot of iPhone shots pop up recently from my trips to New York and San Francisco. Now I can finally share the amazing app that created all those cool FXs!

HDR (Special FX)

I partnered with the amazing Taptaptap team including, John Casasanta, Scott Meinzer, Wolfgang Bartleme and Karl Von Randow, on Camera+ and I truly believe we built the most streamlined and extensive camera App for the iPhone.

Purple Haze (Colour FX)

I spent most of my time creating and tweaking all the custom Scene and FXs for the App in Photoshop. In all honesty, it was really hard coming up with 24 unique FXs.

I can’t even count the number of crazy and horrible FXs I came up with in the process, but I’m sure my colleagues can tell you that “subtlety” is not in my post-processing vocabulary. :P

Hipster (Retro FX).

We went all out on the names of the FXs, “So Emo” being my absolute favourite.

We’ve all had so much fun testing and creating the App, minus the time when we got slapped with a big rejection from Apple for trying to sneak in an illegal feature :-/

It’s been a long process and one that has renewed my passion for taking and sharing images. I am ecstatic to share this App with you! I can’t wait to see what you create with Camera+.

Download the App & show me your photos!