My 5 favourite iPhone photography apps { photography tips }

I love my iPhone – I run my business from it, it helps me stay in touch with my family and friends and what’s going on in the world wherever I am and, more recently, it’s pretty much replaced my point-and-shoot camera as my camera of choice when I’m out and about – my handbag is that little bit lighter now.

If you’ve played with the iPhone camera, you’ll know you’ve got hardly any control over the settings but there are loads of apps out there that can help you with that.  I’ve just done a quick search on the App Store for “photography apps” and it’s come back with 12,714 of them  – far too many for me to investigate them all so the list I’m giving you here consists of the ones that I find myself using on a regular basis. I’m sure you’ll have other favourites. Share them with me in a comment if you do – I’m always on the lookout for new apps to experiment with.

And if the following list inspires you to want to use your iPhone camera more, check out my new iPhoneography workshop.

1. Camera+ – If you want more control over the iPhone’s settings like exposure, then this app will do the trick.  And it includes loads of effects, borders, etc you can apply afterwards, as well as allowing you to crop your photos to all sorts of different sizes and share them on Facebook, Twitter, etc. (If you want to adjust photos that you’ve already taken with the standard iPhone camera, then try PS Express.)

 

 

 

2. Instagram – If you love vintage film treatments, then this app offers you retro styling for your images with just a tap or two, plus it has a whole social network behind it so you can easily share your work with the rest of the world and look for inspiration too.  A few months ago, there was a lot of controversy when Instagram announced they were changing their terms and conditions to ones that appeared to imply they could potentially sell your images without paying you, but that’s all been sorted now so it seems to be as popular as ever.  You’ll find all sorts of people on there from amateurs to professional photographers, big name brands like Marks & Spencer, celebrities, your favourite bands, big name bloggers, etc.  So if you’re in business and you want to show off your products, Instagram is an avenue worth investigating.

 

 

 

3. ShakeIt – Another way of giving your photos that retro feel, this time by adding a polaroid style border.  And for added authenticity and a bit of fun, you can shake your phone to encourage it to develop the photo quicker, just like you used to do with real polaroid instant photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Pic Grunger – You might have noticed that I love messing around
with adding textures on my fine art photos particularly.  That usually involves going into Photoshop and doing some major editing in there, but Pic Grunger allows me to add a range of textures to my iPhone photos while I’m out and about.  Here’s a photo of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, taken while I was walking along the River Avon.

 

5. Pano – When the iPhone’s lens isn’t wide enough to capture the whole scene, use this great app to create a panoramic photo.  You start with the leftmost edge of the scene you want to capture, then move your way gradually across, taking an image as you go.  Pano shows you the right-hand side of the previous photo so you can align the next image you take.  When you’ve finished, it takes a few seconds to automatically stitch all the images together for you and saves it in your camera reel – easy peasy.  Here’s an example I took at one of my favourite holiday destinations, Portreath in Cornwall

 

UPDATE:  If you’ve got an iPhone 4S or above, and iOS6, then you’ll find a new panorama option in the standard Camera app – just click on the “Options” menu when you’re running the camera and you’ll see it as a new option at the bottom. Just move the camera across the view from left to right and the phone will stitch the images together. You have to be careful to the keep the arrow on the centre line and not move too fast though otherwise, bits of your panorama will be missing or distorted, so you might still find the Pano app gives better results.