Rick Sammon’s Photo Buffet is actually much more of an interactive eBook than it is an app. Photo Buffet is a collection of tips for to help new photographers or photo enthusiasts get the most out of picture taking trips. The guide focuses on all of the thinking and moving required to create an atmosphere for your photographs, as well as tips on how to actually take pictures, and then edit them.
The App
As far as apps go, Photo Buffet is just alright. Even though most of the app is really like browsing through a glossary or index of tips, some parts of the UI are still a little confusing. Viewing the sample pictures, for example, can be a little deceiving: iPhone users are trained to think that arrows or quick swipes of the finger will switch pictures, but tapping anywhere on a picture within Photo Buffet will actually close it down. Instead, you have to tap on this strange shutter button at the bottom of the screen to switch between pictures, and you never quite know how many you’re looking at until you toggle through all of them.
Tips and Tricks
Photo Buffet is divided into four major tabs (the fifth is an index): Seeing, Making, Editing, and Tips. As the names imply, the app is designed to be a lightning tour through the various aspects of photography, and best consumed in the order they’re presented. Most tips and tricks feature a few example photos or a quick video to help guide you, but the majority of the guide is made of quick bullet points and text instructions.
The Seeing tab pertains to the subjects of pictures, how to frame them, and what backgrounds you should watch out for. The Making tab covers some of the technical aspects of photography and how to play with the different dials and settings you’ll have on your camera. There’s also a small section at the end for iPhoneography, but the three entries in this category feel more like they were taken from a spec sheet than carefully selected and presented to an audience of readers (one of them just tells you that 3GS can take movies, which should be pretty obvious to owners of the device).
The Editing tab deals with post-processing, similar to the effects you can create and achieve with desktop programs like Picasa and iPhoto. Photoshop is referenced as well, but the kind of tricks that Photo Buffet mentions don’t really need the kind of raw photo manipulation power that Photoshop can bring to bear. It’s a bit like suggesting that you hire a Samurai to chop and crop your photos for you, when you could really just use the free pair of scissors at your desk. The fourth tab, Tips, is probably my favourite, because it deals with very particular situations and subjects, and is a great chance to get very particular instructions from a pro.
Now I don’t mean to sit on some sort of high chair and dictate what Rick Sammon should or should not have included in this guide — he’s the pro photographer, I’m just the guy reviewing the app. However, there were some sections of Photo Buffet (most Editing tips and the iPhone photography section) that just felt like filler: sections with tips so obvious that they just serve to get in the way of the good things the app has to offer.
Conclusion
I took a look at this app not only because I have a passing interest in photography, but because I wanted to see how Photo Buffet would present itself to a digital audience. The app works, but it lacks imagination, which is a little ironic, given the subject being covered. Photo Buffet teaches you to see the world through a camera lens, to be aware, and take advantage of the environment around you — and yet it is organized as little more than a set of four folders with tips and a bit of multimedia to add some colour.
This would be fine if this were a booklet or a website, but Photo Buffet is neither of those things: it’s an iPhone app with potential access to GPS, a camera, and a data plan. I think the experience could have been so much more immersive and powerful it had taken advantage of the iPhone’s amazing capabilities to make something truly interactive. Showing me pictures is great, but it pales in comparison to the possibilities of live photo tutorials where newbie photographers can practice cropping pictures or learn about how touch-to-focus really works. (something along the lines of a “try it now” button).
It’s for those reasons that Rick Sammon’s Photo Buffet, unlike the shutter on my camera [app], never quite clicked for me.
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Rick Sammon’s Photo Buffet is available for $4.99 on the App Store.
The app was provided by David Wilson (developer) for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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