I’m not an Apple fanboy, by any means, but that doesn’t mean I’m not totally smitten with the iPhone.  It does the job or 4 or 5 separate gizmos, and does it better.  Plus it feels nice in my hand, and all of my photographer-friends don’t make fun of me for being a PC guy anymore (they’re now free to tease me full-time about how bad I suck at Rook, or how early I go to bed).

Chain Timer

While tray-processing some sheet film a couple nights ago, I stumbled across an awesome way to use your iPhone as a darkroom timer.  Roll-film wouldn’t be a problem, since you can do the actual processing with the lights on.  Nor would 4×5.  But 8×10 basically has to be processed in trays, in complete darkness, from the time you take the film out of the holder, to the time you’re done fixing it (about 12 minutes with my film/dev combo of Fomapan 200 and HC-110 @ 1:63).  Add to that the fact that most stages of that process are fairly time-critical, and you have a bit of a challenge for cheap bastards like me.  Fortunately, I found an iPhone App – Chain Timer, which allows you to set up multiple timers that will be executed one-by-one.  So you set up a timer of a couple minutes for unloading your film, a minute or so for a pre-wash, 8 minute dev, and so on.  Chain Timer will then make a sound after the first timer, then start the second timer, make a noise at the end of that, then continue on.  Perfect!  If you happen to be, like me, and occasional 8×10 shooter who tray processed their own film and has an iPhone (not likely, I mean what are the odds, right?) then this is the app for you.  It’s only $0.99.  Much better than the previous solution I had, which was a looped 30-second timer running on my PC laptop.  That required too much counting.

gettotallyrad.com In Your Pocket

If you have an iPhone, and are away from the office, and absolutely need to look at the Totally Rad Actions site… well now you can!  The folks at Into The Darkroom have decided to use www.gettotallyrad.com as their first foray into dHTML versions of Flash sites.  More of a novelty to most folks, I’d imagine, but it’s cool!

If you want to check it out on your iPhone, just go to www.gettotallyrad.com/?flash=false (this works on your real computer, too).

If you want to see the Flash version again, you’ll have to visit www.gettotallyrad.com/?flash=true (since a cookie is stored with your flash preference – you’ll need to reset it with this link)

LOLs All Around

I’ve recently discovered the joy that is failblog.org, and the whole family of blogs hosted there (well, alright – the main draw is a site devoted to kitties, but MY personal journey to cheezburger land led me through failblog).  Anyway, get this app and never be without something to do again.