I’ve written a lot about Instagram here, I know. But, you guys, it is like a core part of my very being. It is how I am recording my children’s lives. It matters. And it matters almost as much as the Camera+ app.
I couldn’t use Instagram if I didn’t have Camera+. I mean, I could – I did, for quite a while, before I discovered Camera+ – but I wouldn’t be using it as awesomely. And awesome is what matters, right?
Awesome kids.
Awesome dinosaur.
Camera+ is a photo-editing application that you use right on your phone. I’ve actually got about four folders of photo-editing applications on my phone – each of these folders contains a dozen editing apps, among them PhotoShop Express and CameraBag and TiltShift Generator, and a whole host of novelty editing apps, like Grungetastic and Tiny Planets and Percolator – but Camera+ is the one that I use the most. It’s become my go-to express photo-editing app (Picnik is my go-to photo-editing service online, and PhotoShop is my big gun), mostly because a) it’s easy, b) it has a tremendous range of one-tap editing lenses and filters (which means that you don’t have to fiddle with exposure and saturation settings to get just the right combination; Camera+ has a great variety of pre-set options – one tap of the finger makes your selection, one tap undoes it if you don’t like it, one tap saves it if you do), c) it’s not such a vast range of options that using the app is disorienting (I don’t need hundreds of filters, and I actually don’t want hundreds of filters because I’d never remember my preferences), and d) did I mention that it was easy? (See that whole parenthetical comment about finger tapping, above.)
Tap: Scene -> Clarity; Tap: Effects -> Color -> Magic Hour; Tap: Save; Upload to Instagram; Tap & Swipe: Tilt-Shift; DONE.
Here’s the other thing: it has its own camera functionality, so you can take your photos from within Camera+, which might not seem all that efficient – why not just use the phone’s camera, the one that’s right there in front of your finger? – until you realize that Camera+’s camera is way, way better that the iPhone’s default camera. It has a stabilizer and a timer and a burst setting, and its flash options include ‘flashlight’, which gives a soft iPhone-emitted light effect (which for some low light situations is much better than a harsh phone-camera flash.) Camera+’s camera function is much better than the default phone camera, which means that you can take a much better picture, which means that there’s less need for editing after the fact. And the photo that doesn’t need editing is the easiest photo to edit of all.
