It was only a matter of time before somebody put a SIM card inside a camera. That camera is the Q, comes from Sweden and is – according to the pitch – “world’s first social camera.”
But is it too late?
Squaready is one of my most-used photo apps on iOS. It has one purpose: to take your rectangular photos and turn them into squares by padding the edges, letting you post them intact to Instagram.
The trouble is, it’s ugly as sin, with the kind of interface that you’d expect to see if Linux and Windows XP got drunk on cider one night and had a little “surprise” appear nine months later.
Happily, Squaregram exists, and its a lot prettier. It also now works with Camera+, and has had some UI tweaks to make it even better.
It’s hard to see why the folks at Barcelona-based Honest&Smile built this crazy contraption into a Moleskine notebook, but that doesn’t make it any less neat — after all, Doc Brown built a time machine into a DeLorean. When closed, it looks like any other overpriced book of blank paper. When opened, it reveals a kind of analog Instagram playground.
The Olloclip must be one of the most useful iPhoneography accessories around. It’s a tiny clip-on widget which adds three additional lenses to the iPhone: macro, wide-angle and fisheye.
And until now, the only thing it was really lacking was a telephoto – after all the more-or-less 35mm equivalent lens on the iPhone is already wide enough for most uses. Olloclip has fixed that with this new lens, and added another handy accessory in the box: A circular polarizer.
Talking of taking your iPhone to the beach, here’s another way to keep it safe from harm: don’t take it at all. Instead of Instagramming the topless ladies down at your local sea’n’sand pit, you could roll your own analog Instagram. No, not a Polaroid, but disposable cameras, dicked with to make them take even worse photos than they already do.
Bonzart’s Ampel is a cool-looking — and cheap — digital camera styled on the TLR (twin-lens-reflex) cameras of old. But the retro case design isn’t just a gimmick: the Ampel actually packs some great featurres into the old-fashioned shape, including a dedicated tilt-shift lens.
Pixter is an interesting idea, although one which is – possibly – doomed. Here’s the elevator pitch: Pixter is a for-pay Instagram.
Remember those cool glass filters that act like a real-life Instagram for your real-life camera? They’re finally ready for pre-order, kinda.
Ever wish that there was a kind of Instagram for video? Not the sharing part – I still think that’s wrong for video – but the filters part. There are a metric frak-load of photo-processing apps for the iPhone and iPad, but precious few for grungifying your videos. Thankfully, that just changed. With an update and a complete redesign, VideoGrade is now an essential app for iOS videographers.
Gramatica is just about the nicest Instagram-browser app I have yet seen. It’s essential on the iPad mini, on which the official Instagram app looks hideous thanks to the mini’s refusal to display Retina assets. And on the iPhone it’s even better than the Instagram app, thanks to its full-width pictures and fantastic gestural controls.
We’re used to cheap software mimicking expensive hardware, and nowhere has that been truer than with tilt-shift photography. What was once an effect needing super-expensive and unwieldy architectural camera gear is now a free filter in many free apps.
But the trend sometimes goes the other way. Here’s the Tilt Shift camera from Photojojo, an actual physical digital camera with a tilt-shift lens. For $150.
One of the best things about using an iPhone to shoot your photos is the huge range of accessories you can buy to help out. But what if you’re on a budget? Or you just aren’t really into photography enough to spend more money? Or if you’re just bored today and feel like playing around?
Then you’re in the right place, because we’re about to take a look at DIY iPhone photo filters. And lenses. And other modifiers. And best of all, you probably have most of them around your home or office, ready for some instant procrastination. Let’s go!
I have no idea how many apps there are in the iTunes store that let you add filters to your photos. But I do know how many there are to remove those filters, and turn your picture into something that you can look back on in ten years’ time without cringing: One. It’s called Normalize, and it comes from Joe Macirowski.
Meta is yet another photo filter app for the iPhone, but if you have any interest in this kind of thing, you should just go and buy it right now (it’s just one lousy buck).
Meta gives you a bunch of live filters through which you can snap pictures, and lets you share and upload to the usual places. The difference here is that the filters are genuinely new, and that you’re going to love them.
Remember those neat Lightroom presets which would add Instagram filters to your big grown-up photos? Now the author Casey Mac is back with versions for Photoshop (snore) and Aperture (yay!).
Who needs Instagram? Well, me for one, ever since I gave up on Flickr and never really got started with the evil Facebook. But I’m pretty bored with the Instagram filters already (they could toss them all except X-Pro II and I wouldn’t even notice).
And yes, there are a million other photo-filtering apps out there, but what about a little DIY? If you’re feeling adventurous, grab some tape, some colored gels and your iPhone and head over to Lomography for this great little low-tech project.
Instaglasses. What a fantastic idea. Sadly only a concept (and surely destined to remain so), these special specs survey the scene before you and apply your choice of Instagram filter to the real world. You’ve heard the expression “seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses”? Well, these are retro-tinted glasses.
Twitpic, the photo-sharing service for Twitter, has finally gotten its own standalone app. You can use is to post pictures to Twitter from your iPhone, and you can also browse previous photos you have uploaded to the service (and you probably will have some there already, as many Twitter apps use Twitpic).
You can also use the app as a client to browse photos taken by people you follow on Twitter.
One disadvantage of using an iPhone or iPad as a camera is that you’re stuck with a single, fixed focal-length lens. Optical zoom can work only so far before even Instagram photos start to look bad, and phones with built in optical zooms tend to resemble actual cameras.
The solution? Add-on lenses. Today, we’ll take a look at Photojojo’s four-in-one set of fisheye, macro, wide angle and telephoto lenses. These accessory lenses stick magnetically over the iDevice’s camera, changing the point of view.
