It seems that everyone has a cell phone these days and that all those phones are capable of making pictures. It also seems that most people don’t think of their cell phone camera as a real camera. Sure you can make snapshots or snag a quick likeness of the sunset, but when it comes to taking a picture to be proud of - few people will choose their phone.
That is silly. When the first digital cameras came out - they had ONE (1) Megapixel censors - and it was a huge deal. One million pixels was unheard of! Crazy! Insane!
Of course, today we know that no *real* photographer uses a camera under 12 megapixels, and many have 24 MP or higher.
That is the same kind of silly. My phone has a 3.2 megapixel censor. That’s MORE than what the old Nikon D1H has, and it was the workhorse for *newspapers* for years!
In the spirit of pimping the use of cell phone cameras as serious cameras, we at thevisualCollective are starting a series of reviews of phone applications that you can use to create or modify your cell phone pictures.
Today’s guest is an app called “roidizer,” and is available on the Android Market for the low-low price of free.
image courtesy of market.android.com
Its general goal is to allow the photographer to recreate an older polaroid style image, which it does quite well by simply adding an offset white border to the image out of the camera. The app has a couple tricks hidden up its sleeve that make it one of our favorite cell phone apps.
Using the App can be a bit confusing at first. The user has the choice to shoot a picture in-app, or bring in images from the phone’s gallery to add effects to. The buttons for the Photo Effects and other features are hidden well enough that we didn’t realize there were more effects until we had been using the app for several weeks. The app also does NOT auto-save your edits. There is a little “save” button that you have to press for the phone to make the edits and save the image to the gallery - probably for those people who play around with effects and decide the photo isn’t worth saving after all (guilty).
Playing around with the buttons will eventually get you to where you want to be - Like anything creative, experimentation is key.
Here are a few of the images Matt has shot recently using Roidizier:
Aside from making beautiful pictures, this app works great to keep notes. For instance, Matt has a hard time keeping track of which oil filter goes with which car. To make things easier, he simply photographs the box of the filter, then writes the car that it goes with in the bottom (notes) section.
He then emails himself the photo with some keywords in the subject line. When it comes time to change the oil again, a quick gmail search for “oil filter saab” brings up the image and resulting part number.
What photo apps do you use/recommend? Drop us a comment and we’ll make sure to review them!
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