OGGL: A Refreshing Step Forward for Social Photography

Oggl has launched.

Hipstamatic’s brand new iOS photo sharing application is now available for download in the Apple Store. I had the privilege of beta testing Oggl and with a week since the launch to toy around with it more I'm a believer. Oggl merges all the lenses and filters from the original Hipstamatic app with an artfully redesigned interface, a community driven spirit, some amazing new features, and singular focus on beautiful photography.

The first thing anyone will ask is how is this different than Instagram? Simply put the quality of the photography.

Oggl is about "creating a community of creative people capturing & curating their lives through photography." It isn’t reposting memes, screen shots of notepad dialogues, paragraphs of hash tags, bros sharing abdominal pictures from their bathroom, or preteen girls placing filters over their duck faces.

Oggl is a big step up from Hipstamatic's original photo sharing app. The redesigned personal timeline boasts a clean, minimalist look, that isn’t cluttered with comments. Just tap an image and up pops the user information, location of the shot, and the gear combination it was shot with. You can save the combination used by the artist as a favorite or choose to shoot with it right then. Another great feature is the ability to customize your photo feed between followers, editors choices, shots of the city (currently San Francisco), global photos, and what’s hot – the top trending photos.

On the shooting side, Oggl allows you to shoot manually or use five pre-loaded “favorites” for situational shooting: Landscape, Food, Portrait, Nightlife and Sunset. Your favorites are completely customizable and you can make an inventory of your own. With roughly 30 individual lenses and films - plus more released monthly – Oggl’s abundance of combinations is a photo junkie’s dream.

One feature unique to Oggl is the ability to “curate” someone else’s work. This allows you to save someone else’s user’s picture into your personal catalog. Allowing other users to save and showcase your work further drives the community spirit embedded in the soul of this app; it's a great touch.

With the cross platform integration of Oggl into Hipstamatic’s monthly magazine SNAP - a super cool lifestyle magazine boasting 250,000 subscribers worldwide –there is longterm potential and a great outlet to share you photography with the world.

PROS

Beautifully designed interface
Abundance of gear combinations give you tons of options for your photos
Ability to Curate someone else's work
Lots of customization with gear and filtering photos
Cross platform integration with SNAP Magazine

CONS

App is invite only at the moment
Free users don't have access to all the effects
Will freeze up or get buggy at times

CONCLUSION

With Oggl, Hipstamatic is pushing the quality and creativity of iPhone photography forward. In many ways Oggl is a manifestation of the soul that drives Hipstamatic; a lifestyle and culture brand founded by graphics designers, artists, photographers, and lovers of all things cool.

Oggl is a refreshing step up for iPhone Photography lovers everywhere and it will feel like a whole new photo sharing experience. Give it a try.

Photo Information (the green tab is curate a photo)

Gear Combinations straight from Artist's work

Personal Collection w/ Captured & Curated Photos.

Our Cosmic Neighborhood in Pictures

"We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged."

– Carl Sagan

This image combines 45 images taken over the course of about two hours, as Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Earlier this week NASA shared a stunning collection of pictures from the Cassini Probe, the Messenger Probe, and the Curiosity Rover. This mesmerizing catalog of our cosmic neighbors included stunning photos of Saturn, the Martian landscape, and the first ever photography of Mercury in its entirety.

Here is a very brief rundown of the probes and their missions:

Cassini: Launched in 1997, was the fourth probe sent to study Saturn but the first to enter its orbit. Cassini has collected 450 gigabytes of data and more than 300,000 images. Among those images is a 1,250 wide hurricane (pictures below), traveling at 330mph, across Saturn’s northern hemisphere. The massive and mysterious hurricane is swirling inside a hexagonal weather pattern large enough to swallow four earths.
MESSENGER: An acronym of MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. It was launched in 2004 and reached Mercury 2008. During its time in Mercury orbit it has yielded significant data regarding Mercury’s magnetic field and the discovery of water ice at the planets north pole.
Curiosity: NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission (MSL) rover that is exploring the Gale Crater. Among the mission goals are the investigation of Martian climate and geology, the role current and former role of water, finding out where conditions are favorable for microbial life, and planetary habitability study in preparation for future human exploration.

One thing I found immediately noticeable was the detail and resolution differences between the pictures. Cassini being the oldest of the probes has much lower resolution in its photos than Messenger or the Curiosity. The newest of the bunch Curiosity, is beaming back stunning panoramic views of the Martian landscape with vivid detail. Surprisingly it’s doing so with just a 2-megapixel camera; your iPhone is 8-megapixels.

First photograph of Earth ever taken from Space. Click to enlarge. (credit: CIMSS satellite blog)

The camera size is due to a wide range of issues including NASA’s familiarity with it and data storage issues. Nevertheless by using photo-stitching NASA can still get fantastically detailed and mesmerizing panoramas of the Martian landscape. The difference in picture quality between these images is a reminder that images from space will only get sharper and more beautiful as our technology progresses.

Although human (and robotic) space exploration/photography is still in its infancy the speed at which it's progressing is awe-inspiring. Just 56 years ago we launched Sputnik (first object sent into space) and just 53 years ago that TIROS-1 Satellite took the first image of Earth from Space. Now there’s a car-sized rover driving around Mars taking selfies, probes orbiting both Saturn and Mercury, and an array of telescopes studying our heliosphere.

The images beamed back by these robot photographers serve as a constant reminder of how gorgeous and vast our cosmic ocean is.

A hurricane at Saturn’s north pole that rages over an area 2000 kilometers (1200 miles) across (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

A wider false color view shows the storm (in the center) ensconced in a hexagonal wind system large enough to swallow four Earths. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

This self-portrait, composed of more than 50 images taken by Curiosity's MAHLI camera. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer)

First shot of planet Mercury in its entirety. The yellow-orange sections are highly volcanic lava plains, and the dark blue areas are assumed to be minerals. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and the Carnegie Institution of Washington for the images)

Saturn's largest moon, Titan. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

A quartet of Saturn's moons, from tiny to huge, surround and are embedded within the planet's rings. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

A solar eclipse from the point of view of Cassini reveals Saturn in a way never seen before. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Curiosity at the John Klein drill site. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer)

Saturn's moon Enceladus emitting a stunning plume of water vapor longer than the moon is wide. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

At least 30 separate water-ice geysers shoot from the moon Enceladus. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

A composite of 25 images recorded in extreme ultraviolet light showing emissions from highly ionized iron atoms in the solar corona at a characteristic temperatures of about 600,000 kelvins; about 1 million degrees F. (credit: NASA/solar dynamics observatory)

Curiosity at the John Klein drill site with arm deployed and massive Mt. Sharp in the background (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo)

Taken at a distance of 1.3 million miles, this image shows Saturn dwarfing its three visible moons Tethys, Enceladus, and Pandora. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Surface of Mercury. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and the Carnegie Institution of Washington for the images)

Jupiter's innermost moon Lo which is the size of our moon. (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

'No Seconds' - Henry Hargreaves

Henry Hargreaves ‘No Seconds’ photo series recreates the final culinary requests of murderers, rapists and other Death Row inmates in the United States. It’s a macabre exhibit that explores the death penalty and the morbid fascination it conjures up for many people.

Hargreaves researched some of America’s more famous prisoners and their final meals, then set out to recreate them with a Chef in his Brooklyn apartment. Killers such as John Wayne Gacy, who was charged with rape and 33 counts of murder and was given lethal injection after a meal of KFC, french fries, and strawberries. Or Victor Feguer who was charged with kidnapping and murder, asked only for a single olive with the pit still inside.

For Hargreaves, who hails from New Zealand but now lives in Brooklyn, the notion of the death penalty and tradition of ‘your last meal’ was bizarre, strange and led him to shoot these photos, telling Wired magazine.

“Anywhere else in the developed world, the death penalty is just not even in the conversation, it is a remnant of an earlier era. This little bit of civility, ‘Hey, we are going to kill you but what would you like to eat?’ just jumped off the page. I thought it could be a really interesting idea to try to represent visually.”

Although the photos are staged they serve as an intimate look into the last moments of a death row inmate and a fascinatingly morbid glimpse into the mind of someone condemned to die.

“Most people order fried food, or ‘comfort food’ — that notion was pretty chilly, then ones like the single olive were spooky, as you’re left wondering if there was an intended message behind this.” said Hargreaves.

This Week in Pictures

A collection of striking and powerful images from around the world taken within the last seven days. Enjoy.

Adam Scott winning the 75th Masters at Augusta National (photograph: Scott Brown/Augusta National)

Margaret Thatcher's funeral at St. Paul Cathedral in London, England (photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA)

78-year-old Bill Iffrig has just been knocked off his feet by the blast at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. (photograph: John Tlumacki/Boston Globe)

Mushroom cloud following the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas (photograph: @matt_augustine/Twitter)

Police officers search homes for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects in Watertown, Massachusetts April 19, 2013 (photograph: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi)

A tree among several thousands of tonnes of used tires piled in an abandoned recycling installation in Lachapelle-Auzac, France. (Copyright: Getty Images)

Tsegaye Kebede of Ethiopia runs down the Mall and to victory in the Mens Elite section during the Virgin London Marathon 2013 on April 21, 2013 in London, England. (photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

2013 NBA Playoff Prediction