There’s a touch of freedom that makes the iPhone a great lo-fi camera.
A slew of apps have come even before the App Store opened for business, some notable numbers popularize the term iPhonography (this is how I prefer to spell them). One of them is Hipstamatic, it came late last year and is recently being featured as iPhone App of the week.
If you don’t buy their pitch (they have a story about how it came to life), maybe you should consider mine instead:
It’s a perfect $5 christmas gift for yourself, or your iPhone-using-paparazzo friend, yes occasional crash still happens and opting in high-res output gives you the never-ending wait to snap another around, but you’re in for a different kind of iPhone-photography game, people… and this time you might want to stay a little longer cause digital never felt & looked so finely analog.
4 months, a few dozen notable apps later, this one indeed stays, I still use it regularly, along with Art&Mobile’s TiltShift Generator, QuadCamera & ToyCamera, as well as the lesser-known AutoStitch (currently on Sale) that does a marvelous job stitching those multiple shots into one usable panorama.
As I predicted, Best Camera never lived up to its hype, while CameraBag, the original app that inspired it is still standing strong and introduced a desktop & iPad version to complete your digital camera bag.
And recently, there is Andigraf. Inspired by the artist that started the whole pop-art movement, this digital Andy Warhol copies Hipstamatic’s proven success in mimicking a retro camera, improving upon QuadCamera’s multishot feature with an interval control and a better designed/positioned shutter release.
A few friends recommended SwankoLab; the original app & the pixel perfect graphics comes from the makers of Hipstamatic — I have yet to give it a try, but the thought of actually playing darkroom on such a small screen doesn’t appeal to me, maybe the iPad will change my mind.
Last but not least, Mill Colour is a low profile app that gets the job done, it hasn’t been updated for a while, but its excellent coloring control came handy to give your final image a nice final touch before blasting a tweet.