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The iphone for journalists

The iPhone - a citizen journalists dream.

Okay, so you've got your new iPhone and it does all those really cool things, but how can you use it as a new age citizen journalist?  Answer - plenty.  Enough in fact to make Bob Woodward jealous.  

Easy stuff first.  First you can easily use the camera to send your photos directly from your stake-out to your website or blog. Most blogs these days have the ability to accept photos sent to them from cell phones and pdas.  We'll use PNN as an example, but the same setup applies to most others.  

On your PNN site, place an 'Mobile Photo' box on the page, click on the 'email' tab and select an email address - write this down, go to your iPhone and put it in as one of your contacts, naming it something clever like 'iphonepics.pnn.com'.

Now go to the iPhone's camera application, simply take a photo then go to the photo browser - there's an icon for it (a little box with an arrow in it) in the lower left corner.  You'll see that you have four choices, one of which is 'Email Photo', which we're going to use.

Clicking 'email photo' brings up the email application, and it's waiting for you to enter an email address.   As you start typing 'iPhone' you'll see that the iPhone will start guessing at what address you want to use - now unless you know lots of people whose name begins with 'i' like igor, or ismarelda, your 'iphonepics.pnn.com' address will pop up - which is very cool because you won't have to type anything more.

Now put in subject line text - which will be used as the title of the photo, hit 'Send' and that's it - presto, a couple of minutes later the photo will be up on your site.  

The iPhone's camera is pretty good for this sort of thing.  It's 2 megapixels, which is good enough for web photos, in fact it's best used this way - rather too small for printing decent pictures, and the color and sharpness doesn't hold up in larger prints.  With a little Photoshop work, however, you can make pretty decent prints.

It also suffers from what most cell phone cameras suffer from - shutter delay.  This can be really annoying if you are used to an old fashioned camera.  This is the time between saying 'cheese' and clicking the shutter button, and the camera actually taking a photo.  The problem is that most of the time your subject has moved in the meantime making your photo either blurry or blank.

To make the most of its camera use it in bright light, hold it really, really steady and get close, but not closer than about two feet.

All in all, the camera wasn't as well designed as the other iPhone features, but Apple will get it's act together, and it's great as a portable journalist's tool.  You can get great shots posted instantly to your site in minutes, beating even the best API photographer!

about this column

This column is for the average mac user.  Not the power mac people who were, apparently,  born with a mac in their hands, or teenagers who keep pressing buttons until things work, just ordinary folks who like and use Apple's products in their everyday lives.