Anyway, Alfred recently became even more capable with the introduction of extensions (available to powerpack users – told ya to get it!), which marks the departure from Alfred as an app to Alfred as a platform. With extensions users can perform actions or run scripts.

With the help of some people who actually know a thing or two about AppleScript I managed to write (make/create/copy together?) my first extension for Alfred: “Send URL to Chrome”. What this does is send the URL of the website that is currently open in Safari to Chrome. As you may have noticed after upgrading to Lion is that it comes without Flash, and some people, including John Gruber himself recommend you try to live without it. I surely do. But at times you do need it, and since Chrome comes bundled with Flash all by itself you can now use this Alfred extension to view this bad bad site – that wants you to install a plug-in you don’t want to install – in Chrome in perfectly good shape. Just fire up Alfred, start typing your personal keyword, and there you are.

Download the extension here

Note: For this to work properly it’s best to have Chrome running. You don’t necessarily need to have a window open, though this might cause problems with Lion’s Automatic Termination functionality. Also I want to make clear that I know nothing about AppleScript and have only copied this together from mentioned places on the web. Alas, I’d like to take credit for making it work without Chrome having an open window. If for some strange reason you don’t want to use Alfred and just want the AppleScript, here you go:

property theURL : “”

tell application “Safari”

set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1

end tell

tell application “Google Chrome”

if (count of windows) is 0
make new window
else
make new tab at end of tabs of front window
end if

delay 1

set URL of active tab of front window to theURL

activate

end tell

Disclaimer: I do not purport in any way that this is great photography, or even great iPhonegraphy for that matter. I’m just playing around with some apps – nothing extraordinary!

Apps used

From the plethora of photography apps on my iPhone – more on this little addiction of mine (and if you’re reading this: yours as well) some other time – I used a combination that is fairly common in my iPhoneography:

1. Bracket Mode*
2. ProHDR*
3. Camera+*
4. Instagram*

Let me guide you through this workflow that is very typical for me:

1. Bracket Mode

This is a great little app that let’s you quickly take 2 exposures for combining them later. I really love this simple app, because I can capture a few brackets with different settings on the go and then combine them with ProHDR sometime later, when there’s more time. You can let the app decide on which part of the image to base the exposures on or choose manually.

2. ProHDR

This app works well for combining two exposures – either taken inside the app or imported from the camera roll – into one image with a high dynamic range. In practice you almost always get unwanted halo-effects in those parts of the final image where the two base-images are merged. You can prevent this by taking two base-exposures that are not so far apart, but then again, this is what you use an app like this for in the first place, right? The resulting image is far more dramatic that if you just used the HDR-functionality of Apple’s Camera app, so it’s perfectly right for me.

3. Camera+

This one you have already, right? One of the most prominent camera-replacement apps in the App Store, Camera+ gives you tons of functionality: Tap to focus and set exposure and a 6x digital zoom (who needs this?) to start. What’s more, it features an excellent little post-production suite, with a variety of scenes (to set the basic “feeling” of your image or imitate a certain condition you were in when you took it) and tons of brilliant filters. It doesn’t give you as much control over your images as Iris Photo Suite* or the amazing Photoforge 2*, which both come pretty close to being fully featured image editors, but that’s not the point of Camera+. The point is to allow everyone and their neighbor to make images look awesome – and Camera+ does a magnifiecient job. (Know that this app may be despised by a certain breed of people – namely “real” photographers – and I can see why: It’s fiddling around with presets instead of really editing, but ultimately I don’t care, and neither should you.)
For this image, I chose the scene “Clarity”, which is Camera+’s one stop to awesomeness: It brightens up the shadows and widens the dynamic range of the image, so in itself it is a HDR-effect. Since I already had an HDR-image before loading it into Camera+, the result is even more dramatic. Be aware that if your base-image is too dark you will get a lot of noise with this.
I then cropped the image to a square ratio, trying to follow the rule-of-thirds as much as possible (just look where in the final image I positioned the end of the landing stage – this is where you want the most important part of your image to be, at least in most cases. (Remember: Even the best rules must be broken from time to time.)
Next up is the Effects-panel. In this case I chose “Vibrant”, which ups the saturation a ton and does all sorts of things to make your image more, well, vibrant. I wouldn’t want to post it like this, but knowing what’s ahead this is perfect – call it overcorrection.

4. Instagram

Finally it’s time to load the image into Instagram. It’s already cropped perfectly, so all there’s left to do is to chose a final filter. Knowing from the start that I’d be using “Earlybird” for this one, I had oversaturated the image in the previous step on purpose. It’s still a good idea to check out some of the other filters, since another one might fit better and blow you away. In this case, Earlybird it was.
Last but not least is the title of the image. I tend to chose a title that describes/names what’s in the image… Very creative, I know. Not knowing the word I looked it up, and even though I’m still not entirely convinced this is the right term (someone suggested “boat dock” insteadt) I went for it.

Conclusion

I know from experience that a large number if likes and comments on Instagram doesn’t come out of nowhere but instead depends on a combination of things: Besides a decent number of followers and a good image to start with there is also timing to consider: You have to know when (the majority of) your followers are online. This is more important than you might think at first.
With this image I was especially lucky, because everything came together. I’m still flabbergasted by the response I got for it and want to thank everyone who has liked or commented the image on IG or has made it to the bottom of this post.

*These are NOT affiliate links. If I get the hang of this and make it a regular thing, they may be in the future.