One of the things that really struck me while playing around with the iPad for the first time was how great it would be for showcasing photographic artwork. The display is bright and vibrant without the very coarse gradients seen on other modern display technologies such as the oled used on the Nexus One. The resolution (1024x768) and display density (132 ppi) is high enough that you really need high contrast edges to notice any kind of jaggedness, even as close as a foot away. Furthermore, unlike smaller devices such as the iPhone, the physical size of the screen is large enough to be comparable to a decently sized print.

It didn't take much time thinking about these posibilities before I decided that I

would have to take this to the next level and actually create a photography book for the iPad. Both as a way to test this out as a medium for photographic artwork, but also to test out the App store as a means of distribution for this type of content.

I filled up my iPad with a big stack of photographs from my archive to figure out what would work and what wouldn't. One of the things that immediately stood out were photographs of street art, especially full walls decorated with street art. Something about the rough collages of textures and colors seemed especially enjoyable on the iPad's screen. Luckily, I spend much of my time in an area that has a particularly high concentration of all kinds of street art.

My wife lives in the neighborhood called Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York. Walking through the streets of Williamsburg can at times feel like a strange trip through a giant open air art gallery. In some areas, every single wall for blocks on end has been decorated with a mixed collage of tags, stencils, paste-ups, stickers, colorful graffiti pieces and just about any other kind of mixed media art that can be stuck to a wall. In other words, this was the perfect location to start the project.

I already had a big collection of photos that would be usable, but I decided that to

get a body of work that would fit together as a single coherent collection, I would walk my way through the neighborhood several times taking new photographs so that the result of the book would be a glimpse of the street art scene in Williamsburg right now.

I decided not to curate the contents in any way, but rather to leave almost everything in. Hopefully in this way, readers of the book will get the same feeling of creative inspiration that I get from walking through the streets on my own. The only thing I have deliberately left out are walls that were covered with commercial posters.

After seeing the awesome interface in Apple's iBooks app, it was tempting to take the same route and make it feel like a real physical book, but in the end I chose a much simpler design by simply presenting the photos as a series of photographs next to each other. In this way, when there is more than one photo from the same building, you really get a good sense of walking past that building when swiping your way through the photos.

It would be great to let the user zoom in on large images to really take in all the little details on some of these walls, but with more than 100 walls in the book, having large images would make the book a much too large download. In the end I decided on an in between solution. All the pictures in the book are 1600x1200 pixels. This allows some

degree of extra detail for users to zoom in while at the same time keeping the download reasonable and making the page load times short enough that you don't notice it unless you are browsing very quickly.

As I wrote in the beginning of this page, I view this book as an exploration of the iPad and the App store as a medium for distributing photographic art. I don't know if my design choices for this first photography app are ideal, but it's certainly a begining. The app is called "Walls of Williamsburg" and is available for $4.99 in the App store right now. I would love to hear your opinion on the final result.

Kasper J. Jeppesen
kasper.jeppesen@gmail.com