The Best Camera:: iPhone App

I've been using 'The Best Camera' iPhone app for a couple of weeks now and I have to say that it's the best photography app that I've came across.

The app is by photographer Chase Jarvis, who is one of the online photographic communities most prolific contributors. Chase has also put out a book of his iPhone photos called 'The Best Camera Is The One That's With You', and put up a website that ties in with the app. Here's how it works:

You take a photo with your iPhone or use one that's already in your Camera Roll folder. Then you apply any of the cool filters that do things like - add saturation, desaturate, darken, warm-up, cool-down, add vignette....etc. You can also crop the photo into a square and add a white border. The filters can be moved into a different order to change how they effect the photo, or you can remove the ones you don't like.

After you're done with the editing side, you click on the Share button and you can save it back to your Camera Roll, send as an email, send to Facebook and Twitter (adding text to your tweet too) and even upload it to thebestcamera.com to be displayed on the site. Tap on the Globe icon and it will take you to a viewing wall (see the photo above). This is the view from the Best Camera website and is constantly changing. Now you can see your newly uploaded photo and you can click on a thumbs up icon if you like other peoples photos. Warning it's addictive...but it's cheap!

The Best Camera Is The One You Have With You

I’ve been carrying a camera with me at all times for about 5 months. I suppose technically I’ve been doing that for years - if you count the camera on your mobile phone. But for the past 5 months I’ve been using the Canon G9 as my ‘go everywhere camera’. I’m a Nikon DSLR shooter, but it’s hard to take that, a couple of lenses and a flash everywhere you go.

The G9 is a real piece of kit, well built 12.1 megapixel camera with an f2.8-4.8 lens. the HD movie function is fantastic (especially when it’s mounted on a gorilla pod). If it’s low light conditions, I’ll film in black & white as the digital noise looks more like grain than in colour. One of the best features on the G9 and other point & shoot cameras is the macro function. Ron Brinkmann did a blog on his site last week on point & shoot macro that is well worth taking a look at http://digitalcomposting.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/point-and-shoot-as-a-macro-camera/