It was inevitable that I would get an iPhone at some point – you can’t be an Apple fanboy and resist forever – but I honestly never really considered that I would ever use it for photography. The camera is, essentially, lame, and after using my dSLR I assumed that that the iPhone camera couldn’t produce anything worth looking at… of course you may well disagree with this statement after seeing the following examples.

There are a bunch of cool photography apps out there for the iPhone, but I have fallen in love with just one… the Hipstamatic app by Richard Dorbowski. In a nutshell it attempts to bring back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past. In my opinion it does it very well. Sometimes it is nice not to lug around the dSLR but still take some fun pics on a wander. This is particularly useful for during lunch at work. I can wander listening to some tunes and take some funky retro photos.

The app is extendable (for a fee, naturally) to include different ‘film’ types and ‘lenses’. I have bought a couple of them, as at 59p it’s hardly a rip off. You get a few different styles as part of the original app anyway so you don’t need to buy these extras. The ‘standard equipment list’ consists of: the John S Lens, the Jimmy Lens, the Kaimal Mark II Lens, the Standard Flash, the Dreampop Flash, Ina’s 1969 Film, and Kodot Verichrome Film. Currently it is exclusive to the iPhone, so bad luck Android users and other non-believers. Anyway, onto the photos… The first three photographs were taken on a short wander at lunch.

One great feature of the app is that by shaking the iPhone it randomly selects a film/lens combination. I employed this technique on a wander around Romney Marsh. I didn’t manually select any combination, I just let the app do what it liked.

The infra red film setting came out nicely on this wildlife shot… squint and you can just see the birds flying over. Minimal is good.

It even does well with self-portraits. This app combined with the tiny lens of the iPhone and some mental flare, made a beardy geek happy.

If you have an iPhone and take photos with it, you should buy this app. If you don’t have an iPhone buy one so you can use this app. Simple.