I own a lot of cameras.

A LOT.

My new favorite camera is the iPad with the Snapseed app.

Yup.

New.

Favorite.

Camera.

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I, as do many of you, take pictures for a living. There is still a part of me that wants to take pictures for fun; still enjoy that “wow” factor of a new, cool shot.

Hauling around 30 pounds of gear isn’t really fun anymore; it’s my job.

Sitting down at the computer, plugging in a CF card, downloading X-gigabytes of RAW files into Lightroom yada yada yada…isn’t “fun” anymore; it’s my job.

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You know what’s fun?

Carrying around a 7×9 inch piece of metal and glass that weights one and a half pounds and has a 5MP camera (let’s be honest…not a whole lot of printing going on these days and 5MP is more than enough for digital display…and even small prints) and an eye popping retina display that I can see even in bright sunlight and taking pictures of stuff I see on the street.

That’s fun.

© Hopper Stone

You know what makes it even more fun?

After walking around taking pictures, sitting in a cafe, putting my earbuds into the above mentioned device, listening to music and then opening Snapseed and fingerpainting my photos into artsy coolness.

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Ok, this isn’t an iPad posting, so I’ll leave that one alone for now.

Pros of Snapseed:

1)  Non-destructive editing. You can make as many versions of a photo as you’d like and your original is always intact.

2)  Lots of the great Nik features we know and love: Structure, sharpening, Viveza-like adjustments or Color Efex Pro-like adjustments, Great Black and White conversion, control points (Yes, control points).

3)  Just as Nik introduced us to the concept of Structure, they’ve got a new one called Ambience (under “Tune Image”). Just as with structure, it’s really hard to describe, but it’s truly groundbreaking and will more than likely enter the general photography vocabulary very soon.

4)  Snapseed is perfect for both normal adjustment of your photos to just make them look nicer and for making vintage postcards, washed out color effects, textures…fun stuff.

5)  It’s stable. Rock solid stable. Plays nice with your OS. Doesn’t crash.

6)  All the fun of instagram/hipstamatic but with your input and creative vision…not the code monkey who wrote the app.

7)  5 bucks from the Apple app store.

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Cons:

Can’t really think of one.

© Hopper Stone