Recently the controversial (at least to Apple) camera app Camera+ returned to the app store. This was the app that was pulled from Apples app store when it was found they, Inventive, Inc. , had secretly made it possible to use the volume buttons on the side of the iPhone as a shutter release. Terrible, I know. Well, they have returned, presumably without the volume shutter release, and I am super excited.
There are so many great features in this app. I have already replaced my default Apple camera with this one. If you are a regular reader of this blog you know I take a ton of photos with my iPhone and try app after app to find what suites my needs. Well this app is just about perfect. I love the layout first of all and it seems like this camera loads faster than the default camera. Weird. One of my immediate favorite features you see are the gridlines. It may seem so simple, but it means so much to my composition. Next to the shutter button is a small gear icon that gives you access to different shooting modes: Normal, Stabilizer, Timer, and Burst. I have used all of them and they seem to work well. The Stabilizer surprisingly works when I was taking some low light photos. The timer will come in handy when I don’t have someone to take a picture for me, i.e. on vacation and you would like to have a picture of yourself wherever you are. I have used the Burst mode, but I want to use it showing more action. Obviously it isn’t your eight frames a second SLR, but it could be fun to have a sequence of slower moving objects.
The editing modes seem to have never ending features. You could play with these for days. I took a bunch of pictures (below), edited them and had them saved in about ten minutes. There is so much variety and so many possibilities just waiting for your creativity. The Scenes mode is fantastic for changing the styling and white balance of the photo. All of the other Editing Modes are pretty obvious, but it is fun to just go in and play around for a little bit. From the Lightbox, you can copy and paste an image and then edit them differently to see how you like the different edits. That is a way cool feature. Especially when you are as finicky as I am.
Earlier I said it was just about perfect. Obviously, this pertains to the person using it, but there are a few things that I would like to see in future versions. The biggest thing I would change is when you save an edited picture, I would have it save the original too. Currently, if you edit a photo right out of the camera it will only save the edited picture. You can work around this by taking a picture and immediately save it to your camera roll and then reopen that picture to edit it within Camera+. Not a big deal, but it does take a few more steps and more time. Perhaps a setting you could turn on or off to save an original when you have edited a photo would make more sense. The other feature I would like to see is the ability to apply multiple effects to the same photo. This isn’t something I would use a lot of the time, but I was curious to see what multiple effects would do to the photo. I could save the photo with one effect, open it again and apply the second effect if I really wanted.
Aside from those two things, and they both have a work-around, I really like this app. They also have the ability to share with Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr from within the app. That is a plus. Hehe. You can find it, of course, in the app store or read more on their website here. Did I tell you it was a whopping $.99!
This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but I live in Northern Utah, and our license plates say Ski Utah for a reason. Normally at this time of year we are so inundated with snow that we begin exporting it, but this year has been a little different. We will get a foot of snow and then it warms up and a week later it is all gone. Yesterday a friend of mine called me up and asked if I wanted to play golf. I haven’t played in a few months (remember it snows here a lot) and I jumped at the chance. We had so much fun. When I arrived at the course it had begun to snow a little bit, but it wasn’t sticking on the ground. So off we went. By the third or fourth hole it was beginning to accumulate on the greens, but we just kept on going. When we reached the fifteen hole the sun was starting to come out and the skies cleared. It was gorgeous. I had to take a few pictures to show how beautiful it was. We finished our round and kept going until we couldn’t see the ball anymore. We are expecting more snow this week and cold temperatures, so who knows when we will make it out again.
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