Streetmate is a nice little photo app I stumbled over on the App Store a few weeks ago. It’s a camera app all about shooting, not editing.
Unlike all those filter-iffic special effects apps that clog up the photography category, this one keeps things simple. The only effect it applies is a contrasty black-and-white, well chosen for getting an authentic “street photography” look in your images.
There are some adjustments you can make. It’s possible to add a gentle single color tone, and you have fine-grained control over contrast and image sharpness. I thought the “WarmGrey” setting gave the best results. There’s no live preview; you have to make your changes, take some shots, and adjust again based on what you see.
There are three choices of “lens” – 28mm, 35mm and 50mm. The 35mm and 50mm options are simply automatic crops of progressively smaller sections of your view. Personally, I think you’re better off sticking to 28mm and doing your own crops later if necessary.
Streetmate automatically saves images into albums by date, and copies them at full resolution to your Camera Roll by default. The saving takes time, so Streetmate works best if you do lots of shooting and not much chimping (checking your images right after taking them).
As the app’s makers say:
Streetmate is for people who love to shoot, document and just capture great images. If you like to shoot and then tweak images by hours then this app is not for you.
That’s it in a nutshell. Streetmate isn’t perfect, but it’s a nice camera app all the same, offering something a bit different to the rest of the pack. Good value for $2.
[xrr rating=90%]
