Squeezing a lens into a mobile phone may lead to reduced quality, but it doesn't have to mean bad pictures. Rhodri Marsden takes a snapshot of the photography apps that can make great art
That camera you've got embedded in your mobile phone scores highly for convenience. You can whip it out whenever anything catches your eye and snap an image. But regardless of what the makers might say, squeezing a camera into a mobile phone inevitably leads to compromises in quality. While we wait for technology to deliver improvements, we're turning in our millions to apps that not only conceal some of the inadequacies of our phone's camera, but transform otherwise mundane shots of a bus station, your sister or your socks into a lo-fi, retro-style image with real character.
Facebook walls, Flickr profiles and Photobucket albums are crammed with images that have been generated by apps such as Camerabag, Instagram and Hipstamatic: oversaturated, discoloured - perhaps lacking in realism, but infinitely more attractive than the shot you'd have ended up with without them. As Hipstamatic's community manager Maria Estrada says, "We take a bad camera and make it worse in the most beautiful way."
The future of amateur photography bears a startling resemblance to its past: megapixel perfection is abandoned in favour of images that look as if they've just been picked out of a old shoebox that's been left abandoned in the attic for the past 30 years. It's not just us, either. Professional photographers, seduced by the same simplicity and unpredictability that has made cheap film cameras like the Lomo and the Holga so popular, are also turning to cameraphone apps.
American photographer Chase Jarvis recently produced a book of iPhone snaps called, tellingly The Best Camera Is The One That's With You, while the New York Times printed a Hipstamatic shot of soldiers in Afghanistan on its front page, causing consternation among photojournalists. Should news stories be illustrated by gimmicky pictures produced by toys? The photographer in question, Damon Winter, posted an eloquent defence of his approach online and other photographers rallied to his defence.
"There seems to be quite a strong movement away from the perfection of digital at the moment," says photographer Rob Hudson. "We have these ridiculously expensive cameras and lenses, there are no dark corners in the pictures anymore and sometimes it doesn't even feel photographic. Photography is about what the world looks like as a photograph. That's the joy of it - not perfectly reproducing what's in front of your eyes."
However, anyone seeking real quality should steer clear of the mobile phone, according to Michael Topham, technical editor at Digital Photo magazine. "If you're looking to print images, rather than just let them stack up on your hard drive, the difference in quality between a phone shot and a compact camera or DSLR is huge. Apps merely replicate the effects of expensive kit and the images they generate will always be grittier and grainier than a stand-alone camera."
The quantity of digital imagery we're generating with the cameraphones we always have with us means that those lucky moments occur more and more often and the apps that make those images more striking are popular. Hipstamatic had, by the end of 2010, reportedly shifted around 1.4 million copies. No one could deny that we're seeing the democratisation of photography.
A side effect of the app boom is the interest generated in old methods of processing film. Swankolab, an app produced by the makers of Hipstamatic, emulates darkroom processes onscreen, while Polaroid emulators are being being embraced by kids who may never have come across Polaroid prints in the first place. They're now churning out images that would seem more at home in the 1970s than the present day. The Hipstamatic app itself is billed by the developers as an emulating an rare camera of the same name that was around in the early 1980s. Research has failed to corroborate their story, but there's no doubting its pseudo-retro appeal.
"There's an intrinsic quality to those old-style shots," says Topham, "and it's a really good way of informing kids about old photographic processes that are dying out."Independent
The best iCameras
Camerabag: ($2.59) Camerabag offers more than a dozen filters whose names make a subtle nod to well-known lo-fi cameras - "Helga", "Lolo". If you can't be bothered fiddling around on your phone, the application is also available for Mac and PC.
Instagram: (Free) Billed as a "life-sharing" app, Instagram combines a whole range of retro filters with tie-ins to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr; this creates a photo-centric social network where you can easily follow all your friends uploads.
Hipstamatic: ($2.59) Hipstamatic is the app most closely associated with retro snapping, and stays truest to its roots by not allowing post-processing; just choose your filter and your lens and see what happens. It's the unpredictability that gives it so much of its charm.
Camera+: ($1.29) Flexible and full of features, Camera+ goes beyond filters, adding controls for exposure, flash, stability, digital zoom, cropping and angling. Not so much a fun add-on as a complete replacement to the built-in iPhone Camera app.
Incredibooth: ($1.29) Incredibooth does one thing and does it well: emulating pictures from retro photobooths. "No coins needed", says the blurb - well, none beyond the $1.29 it it takes to buy the app. Use your phone's front-facing camera to take the shots, then wait for an authentically lengthy time for the strip of four pictures to appear.
Tiltshift Generator: ($1.29) Tilt and shift effects were only ever possible to achieve by using expensive lenses, but now you can do something similar for less than $2. Originally a web-based service, its iPhone equivalent allows simple control over colour, blur and vignetting effects.
- TimeOut / Independent
