The 2 best iphone camera apps, and they happen to be free!

I mostly use two applications to take and process the images I capture with my iPhone 4s. At the moment I feel they’re the best iPhone camera apps, and they’re both FREE…

Capturing the Moment 

The first app is Photosynth. This application is about the handiest thing I’ve ever used to capture everything around me, and I mean this quite literally. It allows me to grab anything I can see in my 360° field of view. The interface for viewing captured scenes is terrific and is truly what this app is all about.  I can pan up, down, and all around a curved spacial perspective, like I’m physically viewing what I saw and how I saw it (example’s below).  This app is made by Microsoft, so it’s probably tracking all my data somehow, but anymore I kind of take it as read that everything is leaching information off of everything I do regardless of whether I allow it or not…so yeah, I’m just going to keep using it.

The Wave, AZ

Seneca Rocks, WV

In the setting of Photosynth, I have it set to auto export its constructed images to my phone’s photo bucket. This action flattens the picture, removing the perspective curvature, and allows the image to be brought into other applications for editing.

Processing (editing) Images on my iPhone

I feel like I’ve used a few of the better available smartphone photo editing apps in recent years (free & paid, android & iOS), and my favorite is the now free Snapseed app (I had bought it back when it cost $$).   When I talk about Snapsead, I usual describe it as Photoshop on my iPhone (though not affiliated with Adobe). Adobe does make a real “Photoshop” application for smartphones/devices, but my experience with it has been rather lack luster and I feel it’s too limited.  Back to Snapseed, it has a very intuitive layout, and the learning curve is easy enough. Like with most post image processing, I just play with the different attribute adjustments until an image is pretty to me. Within the application, Tune is one of the primary functions I like, and 90% of the editing I do is within Tune’s sub settings. There are about a dozen other core processing options besides Tune, each with modifiable properties that are very powerful and customizable. I also use Crop and Straighten to trim and align the images I capture with Photosynth, but rather than elaborate too much on how it all works, I suggest just downloading and playing with it..

There’s also a little trick with Instagram too, where I can take a seeming wide angle shot with Photosynth, then crop it 1:1 and make it look pretty in Snapseed, and finishing by posting it online threw Instagram (just adding #tags and not touching any of the extra filters in Instagram, as Snapseed took care of that bit with far better results).

Plaid Barn, taken with Photosynth

Final Thoughts

It’s amazing how powerful just a phone’s camera has become. I started into digital photography in 2004 with a 5 megapixel Olympus and a 64 megabyte memory card… 10 years later I have almost the same camera power in tandem with cellular connectivity, online access,  GPS, and 16 gigabytes of available data storage….at half the weight and size of my old Olympus. My primary camera these days is quite large and heavy. Sometimes in adventure photography my DSLR isn’t the right option for the activity. A slim smartphone in my pocket is extremely portable, protectable, and powerful. Even with a DSLR in tow in my pack, my phone is in my pocket and readily available for those spontaneous pretty moments.  When I’m climbing a mountain or on a rock face my phone is in my pocket, ready for some great exposure shots. More often than not I use Photosynth instead of the standard bulit-in camera app, as with it I’m able to take full advantage of the computing/processing power of a smartphone, and build a picture  from many photos, creating an effect that usually only an extreme wide angle lens can make.

Please post any comments and questions regarding either applications, or smartphone photography..I’m all about good discussion! I’ve added a few more example images below of some of the neat things these two apps have allowed me to capture in combination with an iPhone 4s… The Pictures are in groups of 2, where I started with Photosynth for the first pic in each pair, and the second pic is the Snapseed adjusted/final image.

Cheers,
Gabe

————————

South Sister, OR

————————

Mount Whitney, CA

————————

Matthes Crest, CA

————————

Hallett Peak, CO

————————

Long’s Peak, CO

————————

Horsetooth Reservoir, CO

————————

Clifton Mills, WV

————————

My Office Space

————————

Fremont Bridge, WA

————————

Christmas Sunrise 2013, WV

————————

New Years Day Sunset 2014, WV