HDR Camera, Part II

I've gone HDR Camera crazy!

This app has now made the Droid X my preferred camera for landscapes, easily beating my Canon PowerShot SD940 IS. The Canon has a spotmeter, which is a huge advantage in any camera. But for landscapes, where 95% of the time the sky is at least two stops brighter than the land, HDR Camera wins every time.




The disadvantages of this app are:
1) you take four photos, slowly, to produce one picture;
2) it takes a while for the app to load;
3) you are shooting through a phone's camera lens, meaning it's slow and tiny with no zoom.

The advantages are:
1) awesomeness!



You can even take portraits with it, but you need to advise your subject(s) to hold still as if they are being daguerreotyped circa 1849.


Otherwise you end up with grotesqueries such as this:

HDR Camera

The camera on my Droid X is pretty good: it's an impressive 8 megapixels (which seems better than, for instance, the iPhone's 5MP, until you come to understand the Myth of Megapixels), but more than that, the pictures turn out quite nice. They're sharp, with good color, etc. More than acceptable for a phone camera.

But recently the camera stopped working. Actually, the default camera app stopped working. Retro Camera still worked. So while I was trying to figure out how to fix it, I downloaded HDR Camera, a free (but ad-supported) replacement for the standard camera app. It doesn't apply funky filters like Retro Camera and its ilk. However, it does do HDR (high dynamic range) photography. I've been interested in HDR ever since I discovered what it was and saw the pictures.

Basically, HDR takes three or more shots of the same scene at different exposures, and uses the best bits of each. So rather than having a well-exposed Elizabeth against a bleach-white sky and next to a dark blot of tree-shadow, the sky is dark blue, Elizabeth is still well-exposed, and the dark blot is revealed to be rich green grass under the tree. Nothing is burnt-out, nothing is under-exposed.

HDR in the hands of a really good photographer, with professional grade hard- and software, produces some pretty startling effects:


So I tried HDR Camera for the first time today and it works very, very well. With "real" HDR, the camera needs to be on a tripod so all three or four pictures line up exactly, and can be blended together. Somehow, HDR Camera gets around this. It takes four pictures and somehow calculates better exposure ranges for different parts of the pictures.

I've only used it twice, but it worked well both times, even though my handheld phone/cam was moving around quite a bit. Obviously, it's not going to deliver the goods like professional equipment and software would, but it's exciting that it can provide any HDR effect at all.

The first picture, below, is with the regular camera app, the second is with HDR Camera:

I was excited enough about the results to buy the "pro" (i.e., ad-free) app for $0.99 on the very first day I used this app. It's only the second Android app I've ever paid for.

Retro Camera

For three months I resisted Retro Camera, despite the fact that it was named on almost every list of must-have applications for my Android phone. It's free, so there was no compelling reason not to get it. It just sounded dumb: an app that would make the pictures from your phone's camera look like an old Polaroid picture, or the product of some other, well, retro camera.

Then, in a moment of boredom I downloaded it, tried it, and understood it. It's pretty much awesome. It essentially offers five filters for your phone cam that can, under the right circumstances, transform a lame, limping image into one that runs, sprints, flies!

It adds a few more tools to allow the mediocre-at-best phone camera to meet the expectations of your imagination (if you are the kind of person that attempts art photography no matter what kind of camera is in hand, as I am.)

The one that I like best and use most is called the Fudge Cam, a Kodak Box Brownie clone, presumably. It helped me take the picture of Elizabeth's trike. The other retro cameras (a pinhole camera, the aforementioned Polaroid, etc.) are more gimmicky, less useful -- at least to me. I'm sure some other photographer has figured out awesome things to do with them. Maybe in time I will, too.

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