Autumn is my second favorite season, and this one is shaping up to be pretty darn glorious! I spent a few days in Salt Lake City last month and went for a couple drives up the canyons and into the mountains. Oh, it was so pretty! We have only the most anemic autumn colors here in Southern California, even in my little mountain town, which is mostly full of pine trees and live oaks (neither of which change color), so it was lovely to see some real color.

I made a little video of one of our drives:

I have stuff to share: knitting projects off the needles, books read, recipes made, links found, and a Very Exciting Trip coming up. I will try to get to all of that very soon, but I thought I better put some of my pretty fall pictures up before we are in the dead of winter. I'm working on a list of autumn favorites. Obviously, I need to get that up here before it's too late! 

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I'm trying a new app called Storie:

It makes nice little slideshows. I like it!

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This is just another quick non-recipe post, but it was so delicious, I had to share. I picked up some beets on my way home last night, and they came with the greens attached. Growing up, we always had a vegetable garden, and I remember one year in particular, there were a lot of beets. I don't have any fond memories of beet greens, but I know we at them. A lot of them. I didn't want to be wasteful with my beet purchase, so I figured I'd eat the greens too. It turns out that beet greens are really darn good, and now I'm bugged that there weren't more greens on my beets! 

hmm, still working on my lighting issues for night time food photos. I will figure this out!

I had some wild-caught yellowtail, so I sliced it into inch-thick little steaks. I just seasoned them with sea salt and pepper and topped them with some finely minced shallots. I chopped up the beet greens and also tossed them with some olive oil. I put everything in my cast iron skillet and roasted it at 450 degrees for around seven minutes. I garnished the fish with a dash of ponzu sauce and some snipped chives. Simple and delicious! 

The beets themselves also got the roasting treatment. I par boiled them first, just so I wouldn't have to leave the oven on so long.

They, too, were tossed with olive oil and salt and pepper. I saved them to use in a simple salad for tonight's dinner.

Natural daylight is so much easier! I think I am getting the hang of this!

It's just baby spinach, beets, slivered onions, sheep's milk feta and an olive oil/balsamic dressing. Mr. Heylucy hates beets, so I haven't been buying them, but he may have to learn to live with them in the house. I think I'll sneak him some beet greens and see how he reacts. Don't tell!

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I briefly mentioned a recent book purchase, Plate to Pixel, in a post earlier this month. I'm not done reading and absorbing, but I've been skimming through and one of the things I've really loved about Helene's styling is the rustic table top backgrounds she uses. I didn't see any explicit directions in the book or on her blog (although there is a brief scene of her painting some wood in this promo video), but I've got piles of old fence boards, so I made up my own version. I finally finished it this weekend, and when the skies went dark and a freak thunderstorm rolled through this afternoon, I decided to set it up on the porch and try it out. 

I painted one side a robin's egg blue that I had laying around (someday it will be an accent wall in my laundry room), and sanded the other side, so it's two backgrounds in one! I still need to work on adjusting my camera settings, I think these might be a bit too bright and over-exposed, despite the grey skies. I even started playing around with this reflector set I recently bought, it was quite a bargain! I used the diffuser disc on the photo above and directly below, but there's still some glare. I think I better go read some more, and learn how to adjust my camera better. 

Obviously, my styling and composing skills are rather lacking still, but I am going to keep practicing. In the meantime, I've got some raspberries and cream to eat. Oh, I thought you might like to see the whole background thingie: 

Here are the very technical instructions (wherein I probably don't use any of the proper woodworking terminology): I took three 6' fence boards, and sawed each in half. Then I cut a couple pieces of 1×2 boards that I also had laying around to the width of the three boards together. I sanded everything and laid three boards down, wrong side up. I put wood glue along one side of one of the 1×2 boards, and positioned it across the three boards. I tried to just nail the 1×2 to the fence boards, but the nails just wouldn't go in, so I used my smallest drill bit (1/16") to drill through them (two holes for each fence board) and then pounded the nails in. After doing this four times, my drill bit broke, so I went up to the next one, and hoped it wasn't too big. Luckily, it wasn't so I continued to add the second 1×2 to the other end. Then I placed the remaining three fence boards on top of the 1×2's, and did the same thing again, except instead of the nails going from the 1×2's into the fence boards, I went through the fence boards into the 1×2's. the nails I used had flat heads, and this is the side that I painted, so they show a little through the paint. I was going for rustic, so this doesn't bother me, but I probably could have used finishing nails and counter-sunk them and used a little wood filler to hide them. Then I painted and sanded the one side. I've left the other side naked so far, but I may stain or wax it eventually. This is so much nicer than my ugly green counter tops for taking pictures of food (and maybe other things too!). 

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It's been awhile since I've seen a photo app that I've really liked, and that I think is really original and worth adding to my screen full of photo apps, but I recently discovered Magic Hour, and it's been my favorite app lately. I thought I'd better tell you about it pronto!

 

Like lots of photo editing apps, it comes with a bunch of filters that you can just tap to apply to any of your photos. There are two things that set it apart, however. First, you can create your own filters by adjusting and adding a bunch of different elements: curves, saturation, brightness, contrast, vignettes, textures, and frames. Second, you can save your filter and share it with all the other Magic Hour users in the Marketplace. Filters are free to download, so the possibilities are endless. I've made a few to share. The one above is called Sunny Fade (you can search for it in the Marketplace by name). It looks nice on photos with lots of pinks & greens. Another one I called Dutch Mastered, I like it for cool greens and blues. I think it's a nice, painterly look:

This next one is really useful, I think. It's called Subtle Spotlight, and that's just what it is. It doesn't scream, "I put a filter on this photo to make it look cool!" It just adds a little something, and lightens a dim photo nicely (this one also has a little tilt-shift effect on it too, but that I added with Instagram): 

I wanted a filter to turn a bright blue sky to a faded turquoise, so I made this one and called it County Fair. It's very green, so it works best over photos with lots of blue, I think: 

The app also crops your photos square, so it works really nicely with Instagram when you don't want to use the same old filters when you share your photos there. Have you used Magic Hour? Do you have filters to share? Tell us in the comments! 

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Are you ready for more iPhoneography stuff? I thought I'd tell you about some more apps and show you what you can do with them, and then at the end I'll share a few links to some iPhone photographers to get you inspired. 

You probably have the Hipstamatic app, right? I think it's a lot of fun and I get every new lens and film and flash as soon as they come out. The unpredictablitiy is part of its charm, and I like that. But. I think it can be over used. Seeing photo after photo with the same sort of greenish tinge gets boring. I tend to think of it as a second camera if I'm out and about and taking lots of pictures. I'll do mostly regular photos and then take a few with my Hipstamatic app, and every now and then I'll end up with something that I really love, like this picture of my family, watching a bike race last summer:

I think it can also be used effectively for a series of related photos, although I haven't been organized to do anything like that yet :o) 

A couple Hipstamatic tips: if you shake your phone, the app will randomize your lens, film, and flash, which is a fun way to try out different combinations without any effort. Also, if you look through your album and find a photo that you particularly like, you can tap it and then, on the bar that appears across the bottom of the screen, tap the little camera with a gear icon and you can change the camera settings to match the ones used in that photo. The other nice thing is that you can order prints. I will get around to doing that one of these days and let you know how they are, I've heard good things!

The funny thing is, the same people made another app called Swankolab, and they seem to have forgotten about it, which is a little sad, because I love it. Swankolab is like a darkroom on your phone. You chose a photo from your camera roll, and then mix up the various chemicals and develop your picture. You can create formulas out of different chemical combinations and save them to re-use. And the order in which you mix the chemicals can make a difference! The picture at the top and the one below were both processed with Swankolab using a formula I came up with and call Crisp Sepia (if you want to try it out: Jerry's Developer, Grizzle Fix, Vinny's BL04 are the chemicals). 

Not only do you end up with some really nice effects, the app itself is really well-designed, you can tell they put a lot of thought into it, with the bubbling chemical sound effects and the developer tray which you can shake and watch your photo slowly appear as it processes. Here's another formula I made, called Pale Antique (SwankoDev A19, Larry's Developer):

And that brings me to another app, which is pretty new, called Diptic. I plan to use this regularly, I hope you don't mind. It's very simple, it's just a nice way to make little collages of related photos. It can save at high resolutions (the photo above was saved at 2592×2592), so I bet they would even print nicely and be great for scrapbooking. 

Okay, one last silly fun app that I need to play with some more: Tiny Planets! What does it do? It turns your picture into a tiny planet, of course! I don't have a good example, but there is a whole flickr group, so go there and look. 

Oh, and I did want to briefly mention Instagram, if you're using it, please feel free to follow me, and I'll follow you back (I'm heylucy, of course)! I didn't think I needed yet another social networking app, and I don't post a ton, but it really is a lot of fun, so join in! Just think, if you had been following me, you would have gotten to see a picture of my feet and other exciting happenings in my life (okay, I am really boring, maybe you should follow some other people instead). 

 Okay, here are some iphoneography sites that I have bookmarked that I think are good for inspiration:

• iPhoneography.com is the place to go for all the latest about photo apps, and there are often slideshows from budding iPhone photographers. Lots of great info!
• Life in Lo-fi is another good site for app news. 
• iPhoneographer E. Caves
• iPhoneogenic
• iPhone Film Lab
• iPhoneography Central
• Deb McLean is a professional photographer, but for a little while she was doing occasional iPhone photo posts on her blog. Really lovely stuff there. 

It's pretty amazing just what you can do with a camera on a phone, so get out there and take yourself some beautiful photos! 

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