When I bought my iPhone I thought I knew how I would use it, and for the most part I was right – it would help me to stay connected while on the move in a fashionably compact way. What I did not realize was how much I would use the camera.
I studied photography when I was in college, but hadn’t touched a camera in years, but with my iPhone I rediscovered photography and discovered the truth in the saying “the best camera is the one that’s with you” (iPhone photographers may be most familiar with the saying via Chase Jarvis who has adopted it and uses it to promote his photography app and community at thebestcamera.com).
It would seem I am not alone in my iPhone camera obsession, Flickr have some interesting (if a little vague) stats on camera usage on their site, and the iPhone 3G was the leading camera for some time. While the vague graph (no timeline or hard figures) shows a decline in the 3Gs popularity on Flickr, if we look at the data for cameraphones you can see the iPhone 4 is on the rise, and I would imagine will make it’s appearance as one of the top devices in time.
I have an iPhone 3GS, and the 3 megapixel camera takes decent enough photos, but once you discover the wealth of camera and photo editing apps available things really take off. There are iPhone apps for almost every aspect of photography, but noticeably popular are apps that use filters to simulate a vintage look, such as you might get from camera lenses and film from the sixties and seventies.
While some of the apps that allow you to apply such filters to your photos can lack subtlety, the abundance of such apps highlights the main issue with cameraphone photography – despite great leaps forward in recent years the limits of a phone camera will often yield less than spectacular results without doctoring of some description.
I have a growing collection of camera and photo editing apps the best of which I will review here on MacTrast – but in my quest to discover new and exciting photography related apps I beg you to comment below with your favourites!