iPhones and photography

Tuesday August 3rd, 2010

One of the major features of the iPhone 4 is its new camera, which was glowingly reviewed from the beginning—for example, take a look back at Gizmodo or Boing Boing. (Also take a look at Macworld’s detailed explanation of the technology and how it stacks up against other phones.) In fact, right at the beginning, Peter Belanger shot the iPhone for the cover of Macworld with the iPhone’s camera itself!

Our own Douglas Sonders, who’s into these kind of things, presented a love/hate list after waiting a long, long time in those lines snaking around the Apple Store. He’s posted some photos he took with it since then.

Photo taken with iPhone 4, by Douglas Sonders / Washington DC

Some of the new iPhones have a yellowing problem, Macworld reports; but most people’s hate lists are oriented towards the reception. The camera technology remains popular.

However, the software may come up short for photographers who want to intervene more in the construction of the images, so some developers are beginning to release apps for this purpose. (We recently covered the introduction of apps that allow photographers to streamline model releases.) Douglas has named his favorites, but there’s also a new one called Camera+, developed by the iPhone software company tap tap tap. The reviews of Camera+ generally seem positive, including one from Wired and a few other blogs. The app made about $250,000 in its first month, as which you can read more about on the company’s blog. This has been described as an impressive figure.

Tap tap tap collaborated with photographer Lisa Bettany to fine-tune the aesthetic capability of the app. Her blog is filled with tips on how to take photos with an iPhone (like this), and she describes some of her role in the software development in another post.

Confusingly, there is another app called Camera Plus, which is free and released by Global Delight. It is paired with the more complex version Camera Plus Pro, which Macworld gave a relatively positive but somewhat ambivalent review.

Photographer Chase Jarvis also has an app on offer, with a different purpose. The Best Camera is based on the adage, “the best camera is the one that’s with you,” and allows you to shoot, edit and share your images with the online Best Camera community.

There’s also been a lot of buzz about a short film shot entirely on an iPhone 4 (along with peripheral model train hardware) by Michael Koerbel. Here it is below, with a behind-the-scenes after the film.

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It goes even further—we’ve already seen a couple commercials posted around the internet that were filmed on the iPhone 4. We’d better be careful, though—as the ad below for the French movie channel Canal+ suggests, things might get a little tricky for the actors.

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-Asad Haider