You’ll sometimes find yourself in a bind when the only camera on your person happens to be your cellular telephone. Whether you’re packing the latest smart phone powered by iOS or Android or the hand-me-down that your Dad has dropped in no fewer than three trowels full of thin-set mortar, most of today’s cell phones have some order of digital camera.
In this spirit, we continue our series on how to fully recognize the myriad potential of our cell phone cameras!
We’ll be covering two apps today: one powered by iOS and another powered by the wonderful Android OS (this coming from a rabid Mac user).
Plastic Bullet by Red Giant SoftwareThis app, for the iPhone, is published by one of my personal favorite media software developers; Red Giant Software. These titans are also known for Magic Bullet Looks and a variety of other video editing plugin suites and filter sets.
Plastic Bullet runs the gamut for vintage and quirky looks as many of these smart phone vintage camera apps. The best part of Plastic Bullet is the manner in which it applies its “looks”. Once you’ve captured your image, you can cycle through what seemed to me like an endless list of looks prior to ever altering your image. Furthermore, Plastic Bullet retains the raw image so you can go back and re-apply different looks to the same image indefinitely.
Ironically this is also the shortcoming of this iOS app. Rather thaneventually becoming familiarized with what results a certain set of presets may produce, you find yourself capturing an image and spending the next fifteen minutes sliding through hundreds of thumbnail previews with no real way to dial-in your desired look.
Being that I’m a faithful Android user, I’ve only had limited opportunities to push this app to the boundaries of its capabilities but either way, it is a sensational app and I would highly recommend it for any iOS user. Unfortunately, as with many things on the Apple App Store, it has a price; $1.99.
Images courtesy Apple App Store
Next we’ll return to the Android Platform and a very interesting, albeit, limited app called Action Snap. Oh, and guess what? It’s Free!
There exists out in the tangible analog realm, a breed of camera that incorporate gear driven, sequential shutters and multiple lenses (4,6,8,9). These cameras are acquired rather easily on eBay, but for what they are and how easily they break (I happened to drop mine in some volcanic sand = no more gear movement) they become expensive to constantly replace; let alone developing the film.
Fortunately Oursky Ltd. has developed a simple and functional little app on the Android Platform to mitigate these headaches and nearly fill the void in our hearts left by our non-functional action samplers.
Action Snap can capture images in a vertical panoramic format (like the lomographic quadromat or octomat), in a 4X4 format (like the lomographic cyber sampler) and it will capture single images. There are limited filters: Standard, Lomo, Blue Lomo and Sepia, but the do the job rather well.
This app falls a little short in that there are no adjustments for resolution; in short, whatever the native resolution that the developers established for the application is the resolution of your image…there is no adjustment to utilize your 8mp Droid X2 camera, for example.
There are simple crop functions and an adjustment for the interval of each exposure (ranging from one-tenth of a second to five seconds. There is also a custom interval function but the range Action Snap provides is more than adequate.
For a simple app that is functional and unique to any other lomo’esque camera apps on either iOS or Android, Action Snap succeeds…quite extensively, in fact.
That about does it for this entry into our Your Cell Phone is a Camera series; we’ll be returning for Pt. 4 next week to cover two more apps.
Next week: Instagram for iOS and Vignette for Android.
Cheers!
thevisualCollective
thevisualCollective
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