❧ JC Medina

In 2011, I decided to allocate a percentage of my monthly salary to a conceptual Karma Fund - a personal movement of cosmic goodwill capital governed by three simple principles:

1. It’s an acceptable/humane percentage of your gross monthly salary (you can start with 5%)
2. There should be a layer of interactivity with your act of charity- recipients undergo a certain selection process.
3. Gains from the karma fund are primarily tangible and not just an overall good feeling about yourself. There will always be an exception for intangibles (like not going to hell. kidding).

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In a span of one year, I’ve transitioned from a Blackberry Bold 9700, an LG Optimus V and finally ending up with refurbished iPhone 4. 

The iPhone 4 has a great camera and has effectively replaced my Lumix LX3 as my point-and-shoot of choice. All that without taking up much real estate in my pocket. 

With the popularity of Instragram and other photo sharing apps, I’ve also replaced my original workflow up taking photos with my LX3 + doing a little bit of post-process work on Picnik (shutting down soon).

In celebration of New York City’s first snowfall in 2012, I trekked to Central Park for some cameraphone fun. While my photos aren’t really Explore/Popular material, it’s definitely “better” than what I would normally shoot. This is a walkthrough of my workflow. 

I started out with Photosynth, the great Microsoft (oh, the irony) photo stitching app available in the iOS app store. It’s free and has the amazing ability to produce really nice panoramas. I previously installed the 360 Panorama App ($0.99) but found the free Photosynth app more fun to use.

Far from perfect, there’s a handy feature within the app that allows you to Auto Crop the image above. Here’s the cleaned up version. 

Looking okay so far. I then opened the Camera+ App to do some editing via filters. Since this is snow and I wanted to establish contrast between the white fluffy ice and the trees, I applied the “Night” filter on the image. I then finished it with the “Fashion” filter since it the white was almost luminous. 

I wanted to expand the white space on both end of the photo, with the intention of making the horizon look isolated. For this purpose, I used the AntiCrop application to add more white. In the spirit of Bob Ross, I even added more happy little trees on the side. 

I finished my workflow with this image. Now ready for sharing on Instagram + Path. 

2010 

2011

youngmanhattanite:

Yikes.

In my quest to earn the Pizzaiolo badge from Foursquare, I somehow managed to sample over 20 NYC Pizza joints in a span of two months. 

It was gross.