FiRe Field Recorder

After reading lots of reviews, I decided to buy FiRe Field Recorder from AudioFile Engineering today. It won out over the also excellent iProRecorder from Bias, the creators of Peak, because of its integration with SoundCloud. I'm amazed with the sound quality and the ease of use. My very first recording came out good enough to post here. I didn't even have to put it through Levelator!

20091030 FiRe Field Recorder Review  by  laurensbonnema

My Favorite iPhone and Mac Photo Apps

I had lunch today with a friend who's a bit of a photography-nut (which is a Good Thing mind you) so naturally we ended up discussing iPhone photo apps. He recommended CameraBag to me to do some sweet image post-processing on the iPhone. Trusting his judgement, I downloaded it as soon as I had a chance to, i.e. ten minutes after lunch. And it rocks! With CameraBag, you can add filters to you photos before you upload them or send them. It's a simple and fast way to improve you plain vanilla iPhone pics.

Of course, using CameraBag got me thinking what else I'd been missing out on so far. After some googling and review reading, I've come up with the following must-have iPhone photo apps in addition to CameraBag:

• Photogene, for on-phone editing and filtering beyond CameraBag.
• ColorSplash, which lets you quickly and easily give photos a dramatic look by converting them to black and white, while keeping your chosen details in color.
• AutoStitch, a fully automatic image stitcher for the iPhone.

Of course, I do most of my post-processing and editing on my Mac. For that, I use Photoshop Elements for post-processing of RAW files and correcting stuff like lighting and red eyes, Pixelmator for all edits I can't do with Photoshop Elements such as advanced filtering, and Photomatix for creating HDR images.

And now, let's go take some photo's...

UPDATE 2009-10-16: In addition to the aforementioned iPhone photo apps, I've completed my collection with the following apps:

• Darkroom, for taking steady shots.
• Photo fx, to complete my set of filters by adding everything but the kitchen sink. I don't need all of this, but boy do I want it!
• TiltShift, simulates a tilt-shift lens that tricks your mind into viewing a photo as a miniature scene like a model railroad for example.