Pocketbooth – Awesome App for Apple iPhones / iPod Touch

When you have owned your own photobooth rental business in which you converted old booths by programming digital cameras to do the shooting. When you have built up a considerable body of photobooth art and co-created the destination website for photobooths. When you have hosted a photoboorth art convention. What do you do for an encore?

Well, if you’re Tim Garrett, it’s simple. You come up with the coolest iPhone photobooth App in the App Store.

Artist/entrepreneur Tim Garrett has designed an App which perfectly leverages the dual camera features of the iPhone 4G and new iPod Touch, but which will also run on iPhone 3G and 3GS if you have the iOS 4 software update.

At the App Store, Brian Meacham, the co-creator and curator with Tim of photobooth.net, which makes him a man who knows a thing or two about photobooths, writes in an unsolicited review:

“It’s all in the details with this app: the fit and finish is beautiful, it works like a charm, and it’s true to the legacy of the real photobooths we all remember.

The wood grain, ’50s green plastic, and metallic details look great. The options are nice, too: color or b/w, matte or glossy, and three or four photos per strip.

The app feels like a real photobooth: the mirror and lights are there, the photos drop down into the metal slot, and even the strips themselves mimic the dimensions and appearance of the old strips.

It’s really the next best thing to a real photobooth in your pocket.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Tim is a good friend of mine and for that reason alone I want his App to do very well. But I can honestly say that the 20 minutes I spent testing out his App and posting the strips to my Facebook profile were really, really enjoyable–and I take lots and lots of pictures with some pretty nice cameras on a regular basis.

It was fun to mug for the front camera like in a real photobooth and see the red dot on my face as the camera paused between shots and I desperately tried to come up with interesting faces.

For me as a photographer, though, it was even more enjoyable to use the standard back camera setting and go around the house to find and capture little cameos with 3 or 4 photos in each strip which were related to each other only by how I chose to make them related. Fun stuff.

At any rate, this App will normally sell for $2.99, which I think is pretty good deal, but just now it is available for the insanely low price of $0.99. Get yours today and take the fun of a photobooth wherever you go.

Stack of Wheat (Snow Effect, Overcast Day), 1890/91

i feel the dying
light locked in the ice that keeps
summer in these stacks
_________

One of the reasons I payed the $18 to get into the Art Institute Chicaco was to see Monet’s wheat stacks. They were not as large as I remember them as a child, but still equally moving, actually probably more so. I love how Monet explores how the light interacts with the wheat stacks and woods and houses and fields in different seasons.

I have a feeling that some folk view Monet as a relative lightweight and associate him only with pretty pictures of waterlilies. However, I like him a great deal and and appreciate the way he portrays the quality of light in different settings. Also, on the whole, I believe I like the Impressionists better than the later Expressionists, with the exception of Mr. Van Gogh, who is amazing. I am not sure what category in which he falls, actually. Thoughts?

P.S. Paying the $18 for the Art Institute Chicago made me appreciate once again many of the free offerings in St. Louis, including our art museum. However, I do understand that Chicago cannot exactly do the same thing as: a) their Institute is, I believe, several notches above our own museum, and b) they certainly get a higher tourist traffic flow.

P.P.S. While you can take pictures of paintings, sculptures, etc. in the Art Institute (except of visiting exhibits) you cannot take photos of photographs. On one level, I get this as it would be perhaps easier to pass such photos off as one’s own or make to reproductions. On another level, however, I do not get it at all as I could equally well make reproductions of a painting from a photograph (albeit perhaps a rather poor reproduction). And as for passing it off as one’s own, well, the only reason I couldn’t with a painting is because many of the artists are rather more well known and I could not get away with it. At any rate, the discrepancy kind of bugged me. And working in the photography medium, it made me sad I could not document images to show others for reference and discussion, and, yes, perhaps even for a springboard for my own work, which I am sure I do with lots of other media as well. Sigh. At least the docent did not make me delete the pictures I took of a photobooth piece I am wanting to show to Tim Garrett, master of all things photobooth (yeah, that is also his site).