In one of the photography lectures I gave onboard our ship to Antarctica, I showed some simple edits you can do to your smartphone photos—tweaks you can make right on your smartphone, with no need for a laptop and Photoshop and all that. You can crop, straighten crooked horizons, add contrast, improve the color saturation, and so on.

One Penn State passenger who took the instruction to heart in a big way was John Cannon. He was taking some pretty great photos with his iPhone to begin with, but he really became enamored of playing with them in the iPhone’s photo editor, and frequently would show me the results he was getting. And each time he did, I’d love the image so much that I’d ask him to Air Drop it to me immediately. (Not familiar with Air Drop? Remind me and I’ll do a post on that sometime.)

The photo at the top of this post is one of John’s, and so are the ones below. Read more