Tiny Planets

The cool photo apps for my iPhone never cease to amaze me.

In September, I told you about ColorSplash, a photo app that allows you to quickly change a photo to black and white, and then return selected portions of that photo back to colour. It's a great app to have when you want to draw the focus of your photo to specific subjects. For example, I visited the National War Memorial, downtown, on Friday, for Remembrance Day. And I wanted to focus on the poppies that adorned the wreathes that were laid to honour and remember our fallen soldiers. It made the image more powerful to be in black and white, but to have the poppies still red.

A couple of weekends ago, I was introduced to another photo app, but this one does amazing things to your photos. It's called Tiny Planet Photos.

This app wraps images into a circle that gives the impression that the world in which your subject is located is very small. The subjects are distorted, but depending on your composition you can get some pretty stunning results.

I found that the best photos to use are ones that have a clearly defined horizon with subjects that are placed both above and below that horizon line. For example, I took a photo that I shot of San Gimignano, Tuscany...

... and got this:

The app recommends that for best results, you use photos with a landscape orientation, but I took this portrait-oriented photo of New York City...

... and the app produced this effect:

You can also set up the photo to give the appearance that you're looking down a pipe or a gun barrel. To see more of my Tiny Planet photos, check out my photos on Flickr.

So if you love photo apps, this is one that I highly recommend. Have fun!