iPhone Camera Apps - My Thoughts - Part 1.

If you are one of the bazillion iPhone users like myself, you have discovered that it's a great point and shoot camera as well as a game console, movie player, music player and oh, ya, a descent phone. I however, do not like the native camera app on the phone even with the improvements they have made to it.

Enter the third party camera apps. I'm going to talk about the 3 I have.

Instagram.

Camera +.

Camera Awesome.

Let's begin with the most famous one. Instagram.

Instagram is a great photo sharing app that allows you to snap a photo and do some cool editing with the built in presets and add some blur if you like. My favorite preset is Lo-Fi, a nice high contrast preset. You can then share the image out to the Instagram service as well as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Email, and a host more. It uses a square crop format that I'm not sure I like but it's a nice easy service and the images look really good.

Here are a couple of images I took with it today just for this post.



Actually this second one is from Easter. I re-posted it again to show the blur effect.

Over all, I really like Instagram. It's quick and easy to use and allows you to share to many places at once. I really recommend this app for anyone who is looking for a nice quick way to share photos from their phone.

Camera +.

Camera + really raises the bar for these apps. You can do so much with it. You are able to set the focus point and exposure point at different areas of the photo. I like that. The camera section has a stabilizer function that works very well, a timer and a burst mode too.  You can zoom with it which is nice as neither the native camera app or Instagram offer that.

The menu allows you to turn sounds on and off, turn geotagging on and off and many other useful options.

The editing area has a ton of great presets along with the ability to rotate the photo, crop, add special effect to the image as well as borders. I've not played with the special effect looks much but the previews look great. The scene selections are similar to what you would have on a regular digital camera with auto, beach, scenery, etc. Great stuff.

The images can be shared out to all the usual suspects as well as emailed and saved to the camera roll on the iPhone.

I've used this app quite a bit since purchasing it. I really like it and I'm happy to play around with it.

Here are a couple of sample images.





I'm going to stop right now as I really need to play with Camera Awesome a bit more before giving my thought on it. It's way too Awesome to just plop some words down about it.

Stay tuned.

Chris.