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:

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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