i like my iPhone camera

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

I’ve been playing around a lot with the iPhone camera since I got my 3G iPhone a few months ago. I got Camerabag (£1.79 at time of writing) pretty early on, as it processes images from your Photo Library or can even capture directly from the camera itself. The selection of filters it can then apply range from imitation plastic lens types (Helga and Lolo) to a couple of mono filters and various retro effects. There’s a fisheye but it’s not really worth using. You can have the app crop and border your conversions, or either, or neither.

The filters can take a decent iPhone photo and give it a really appealing tone, and predictably I’m a big fan of the Helga look – heavy vignette, contrasty colours, slightly desaturated.

I also use Pano quite a lot, a panorama app. Does a really impressive job of stitching up to 6 images together, either panoramic or portrait orientation. It’s £1.79 as well. You can even create a panorama and then run it through Camerabag, but you do lose most of the resolution when you do that as Camerabag has an upper limit of 1200 pixels on the longest side. A 6-frame panorama straight out of Pano is a lot bigger!

So it’s not like having my D200 in my pocket, of course, but it does mean I can keep an eye out for new photo opportunities even when I don’t have my big toys with me, and that makes life more interesting. :)

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Related reading:

1. QuadCamera – my all new favourite iPhone camera app I’ve got a new obsession on my iPhone, and it’s name is QuadCamera (made by Takayuki Fukatsu and available on the iTunes App Store here, currently £1.19 but apparently it will go up in price after the next update). It’s basically a software application of the popular Lomo Supersampler cameras,...
2. what’s happening with iPhone camera apps? I love my iPhone for all sorts of reasons. One of them is that although it has a terrible camera (as mobile phone cameras go – and yes, even the new 3GS camera is pretty crappy in comparison to the rest of the market), it’s fun to use. Because I...
3. these are a few of my favourite… iPhone photo apps – part 1 Featuring: - four excellent iPhone photo apps - a review and guide to each one - dozens of screenshots and photos - links to their App Store pages...

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 1:50 am. It is filed under iPhone and tagged with apps, camerabag, iPhone, pano, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.