The 5 Best iPhone Camera Apps (So Far)

Next to email, web browsing and text messaging, the best thing about the iPhone 4 is the camera. (I'd even put it above the iPod and voice calling functions.) It really has invigorated my "real" photography and has me thinking all the time about making something creative with photos in ways I never have before.

My latest posts on Man of the House detail what I think are the five best camera and/or photography apps on the iPhone right now. A few months ago the list would have been different, and I'm sure in a month or two it will be different again.

Camera+
Camera + is the best picture taking application on the iPhone (that isn't made by Apple). It's got lots of features but doesn't get in the way of getting to taking pictures quickly. A steal at $0.99.

TiltShift Generator
Since I've written this piece, other apps have incorporated "tilt shift" functionality (namely Instagram), but this one is still one of my favorites. Blurring the focus on elements of an image can make your iPhone's camera look like you've got a thousand dollar lens on it.

Plastic Bullet Camera
The best app for making your iPhone's camera look like a crappy camera is Plastic Bullet. Like the the crappy plastic cameras it's very random, and often very awesome. And i's made by people who make insanely expensive professional video cameras, and it shows.

ToonPaint
ToonPaint turns your photo into an illustration. Even though I wrote about this app on Modern Day Dad already I had to include it in the top five. It's still lots of fun to use.

Instagram
I look at Instagram every day, and it's getting to the point where if I take a cool picture, I'm more likely to post it to Instagram than Facebook. I couldn't have imagined that would be true six months ago. It's got a great community, fun filters to put on your photos and lots of inspiring images to look at. And if you're on Instagram too look me up. I'm "thechrisford" in Instagram.

iPhone App of the Week: Momento for iPhone

Let's assume that you're a person in 2011 with a smart phone and a Facebook account (or Twitter, or a blog etc.). You may not know it yet, but you're creating a diary. Walking around, taking pictures of your kids, updating your status, "checking in" to the park or restaurants - all of these things create a digital time-trail of where you've been and what you did. Momento for the iPhone is an ingenious little app that takes all of that stuff and aggregates it into a diary - automatically.

I've never kept a diary, and although a few years ago I tried tweeting all the stuff I did each day (I was inspired by the Twitter account of John Quincy Adams). It lasted all of a day or two. But I do create Facebook status updates fairly regularly, as well as post pictures, check in to Foursquare and blog. Momento takes all of those things and then puts them into a calendar so I can see what I was up to.

Once you give it your information, it will go back and grab as much as each service will provide, in many cases going back and getting months or years worth of stuff. It's really fun to go back and see what you were complaining thinking about a few months ago, or what your kids were up to, or what you thought was important at the time. You can also enter diary entries ("new moments") directly into Momento for those moments you want to keep but don't necessarily want to share with the rest of the world.

Though it will import from nine different services plus RSS/Atom feeds, there are a few other services I'd like to see. I'd love it to aggregate content from my Instagram feed for instance - or go back in time and find my TextAmerica Moblog images. (Is it even possible for anyone get those back?) It's also not optimized for iPad, which is unfortunate because I think it would be really cool optimized for an iPad - especially for viewing photos. An even better feature would be the ability to purchase a printed diary of what you did for an entire year (or other specific time frame). A skeuomorphic "virtual" diary transformed back into a real paper diary would be awesome.

I love this app, not only for what it does but for the possibiilities of what it could deliver in the future. Momento is made by d3i Ltd. and is available for $2.99 in the iOS App Store.