With 7000-8000 in expected attendance, I was on the fence as to whether or not I would be bringing my Nikon D7000 camera along for an evening of Ho Ho Ho’ing in downtown Reno for the 2011 Reno Santa Pub Crawl. Well, I decided against it, having recently picked up an iPhone 4S and not wanting to trust thousands of drunk Santas (myself not excluded) with the well-being of my relatively expensive gear. The iPhone 4S (fitted with Power Support USA anti-glare (front) / crystal (back) screen protectors) fit snugly in my front pocket and required a much less demanding schedule of maintenance on this alcohol-centered outing than the bulky DSLR would’ve any day of the week; and with the newly re-designed camera in-tow, I felt pretty darn confident with this as my go-to shooter of the evening … even if I wasn’t fitted with the freshest iPhone lenses from Photojojo.
For most (I believe all except for the screen capture of the map) of the shots seen in this post (and recently in my Instagram feed), I used iOS 5’s HDR setting when shooting the originals and began the editing process by combining the HDR image + the non-HDR (original) image in iCameraHDR. The process continues in either TiltShiftGen, FX Photo Studio or picfx before finishing color and style and importing to Camera+ for part one of the border creation (round edges on a landscape-shaped image). Part two of border creation (placing a non-square image neatly within the confines of a square) takes place in Squaready and the photos are (finally) uploaded to Instagram (no filter) in the format seen below. This process was beyond horrendous using my previous device (iPhone 3G) and took nearly 15 minutes per photo. With the iPhone 4S’ A5 processor stepping up to the plate here in late 2011, this process can now be completed in 5 minutes or less … which means more time for prancing around downtown Reno with our hypercolor plastic glasses and Santa hats!
Memorable Highlights: Santa’s Package Package at Strega Bar, Tortilla Toss under the Reno arch at midnight, BBQ + Hot Wings at Men Wielding Fire
In short, we had a blast … and will be back next year for more festive celebration!
