Photo by Doc Pop

Happy 5th of July :) Over on Twitter, we asked you guys to share your favorite mobile phone shots of fireworks, and these are what we got! Thanks for the inspiring photos!

Happy National Doughnut Day! Every Friday is doughnut day in the office, but the first Friday of June is NDD, so today our pal Herzog went the extra mile and made us a batch of home-made doughnut-muffins. Awesome, right?!

Ever wish you had your own personal rainbow? Then we’ve got the perfect gadget for you. The Rainbow Machine combines light painting and long exposure photography along with a quick flash of light to create great portraits.

The creators of The Rainbow Machine recently set up their project at the MTV O Awards and used Postagram to send physical copies of each photo as a postcard. Totes awesome!

The creative folks behind The Rainbow Machine are looking to take their show on the road. If you have a cool event coming up, you should consider hitting them up. I can’t wait to have my own rainbow portrait someday.

We just got this great Postcard from Tom Van den Bon as part of his cool Random Postagram to Random Stranger project. I love the idea this little project and can’t wait to hear Tom’s thought’s at the end of the project. If you haven’t signed up up yet, there’s probably still time sign up for a randogram here.

Looks like other folks are enjoying their cards too:

Got my random @postagram postcard from @geekc0der today!
- @jeremybrooks

Things have been busy here in Postagram-land. We’ve been quietly rolling out some new features and updates that we think you’ll enjoy. Many of these changes were direct results of popular requests from you guys via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Thanks so much for the feedback, we hope to continue hearing great suggestions on how we can better improve our apps and the entire Sincerely experience.

Adding sender names to the back of the Postagram – We received a lot of feedback that users didn’t like the placement of their name on the front of their Postagrams. We have now moved the sender’s name to the back of the Postagram, right beneath your personal message. Each card will also show the card’s order date printed right below the user’s name too.

Delivery notification emails- We have worked with the US post office to track when each Postagram has reached the recipient’s local post office. When the card you sent reaches it’s final post office, we will send you a notification email. Your recipient will be receiving the card in the next 24 hours – and you’ll know to expect a happy phone call.

New award levels- We’ve always given you 5 Sincerely credits (good for one domestic Postagram) for each friend you help sign up for a new Sincerely account, but now we are experimenting with a few different reward levels for our more active users. “Black”, our starting level, will automatically receive 5 credits for each new sign up. “Silver” users will receive 6 credits for each new friend that signs up. “Gold” users will receive 7 Sincerely credits for each new user they help sign up. The more friends you sign up, the higher the level you reach. We will continue adding more rewards for each of these levels in the future too.

That’s it for our recent updates, but we still have more big plans in the works. If you have a feature request, please share it with us in the comments below. Thanks!

We are thrilled to debut this amazing fan made video for our Postagram app by Pete Gill. Pete is a Los Angeles based filmmaker and musician who really digs our little postcard app, so he made this short video with some help of some friends and his grandfather.

We love how simple and charmingly this video captures what Postagram is all about; keeping people connected. Thanks so much for sharing your work with us, Pete!

Do you have a Postagram story you’d like to share with us too? We’d love to know about it. Email your video or story to doc@sincerely.com and we’ll share it on the blog.

When Camera+ launched Clarity a year ago, it was a huge breakthrough for mobile photo apps. Clarity analyzes your photos and automagically balances boosts contrast and other adjustments to boost your colors and make the details pop. Clarity has been the king of the auto-enhancing scene for the last year, but a few apps have recently stepped into the game. Let’s take a more in depth look at Awesome Camera and Instagram to see how their auto-enhancing settings compare to Clarity

Camera+‘s “Clarity” -
pros: As the name implies, Clarity does an incredible job of making details pop. It also does a great job of boosting the contrast and bringing photos to life.
cons: The HDR-effect that helps bring out details, can also result in unnatural coloring/shading or a light “halo” effect (often noticeable with objects photographed in front of a bright blue sky). Some colors get “bleached” out. The level off the effect is not controllable [though advanced users should check out our Postagram Tips video on how to get variable Clarity results with the Blender app].

Instagram‘s “Lux” -
pros: It’s a free app, with a great community attached to it. Brings out a warmth in images. No “halos” around your images.
cons: No variable controls. Can only be applied when posting images to Instagram, so your resulting images will always be square.

Camera Awesome‘s “Awesomize” -
pros: It’s free. Variable controls allow you to determine how much of the effect gets applied. Works great for low light photos. Offers subtler/more natural changes to your photos.
cons: Unlike the other apps, Awesomize tends to dull out vibrant photos. Doesn’t bring out the details much.

The winner? I was surprised to find that Instagram’s Lux was my favorite single app for enhancing my iPhone photos. Lux does a great job of balancing image enhancement while still keeping a warm and natural feel to your photos.

We’ve sent out the first newsletter in our “Doc’s Guide To Mobile Photography” series and the response has been great! Thanks so much for the support and we are sure you guys will enjoy the upcoming issues as well.

For those of you who missed it, you can read the first newsletter online here… and be sure to sign up to receive future updates.

I’ve been wanting to make my own cinemagraphs ever since I saw Photojojo’s excellent tutorial, but messing around with Photoshop turned out to be a bit trickier than I had hoped. Luckily the new Kinotopic app for iOS makes this whole process a breeze! A cinemagraph is an animated gif that looks like a static image, but with a few parts of the image actually moving. It’s like a cross between photography and videography. Creating these surreal images with Kinotopic is actually pretty easy. You start with a short video, then select the parts of that video that you would like to animate. Kinotopic will then create an animated gif where everything stays totally still except for the highlighted sections.