DaveJays Blog

Setting up an iTrapped photo for your iPhone

SEP 3rd 2007 • 1 Comments

I just thought I would share my experience getting my iTrapped photo of my brother made for my iPhone. This is the original idea of "Stillframe" on flickr who's iTrapped photos can be seen there. Apparently there's been so much buzz around the concept he's thinking of launching an official iTrapped website - I'm curious as to what the latest progress of that is.

The final result of my own attempt is seen below. You could go all out and get a nice backdrop with some good lighting equipment, but all I used was our front door and a lamp.

Setting up the shot

• Find a nice big glass surface like a window or a door, I used the glass door on the front of our house.
• Wait until it gets completely dark outside since the shot looks much better if you're on a black background.
• Turn off all the lights inside the house to reduce the amount of glare in the door.
• Get a lamp - I used an ordinary Tungsten lamp, but if you have something fluorescent it would probably look better.
• Get a willing (or possibly unwilling) participant to smush their face up against the glass. The harder they smush their face the better it looks. Tell them to really push hard.

Post Work

Now just take the picture and import it into the computer. I used photoshop to cut out the picture and paste it on a completely black background. In order to get the photo to fill the entire screen on the iPhone when it rings, you have to import the photo onto the phone, find the contact you want it to be set on and then edit the contact and "choose an existing photo" on your iPhone to be the contact picture. I tried setting it as the picture from my Address Book on the computer, but it doesn't seem to work that way. The quality of the contact photo in Address Book is too small. Although I suspect that this will change when Leopard comes out.

So here's my final result. Make your own iTrapped photo and add it flickr tagged "iTrapped".

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