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If you have a smartphone, chances are you have taken anywhere between 1 and 2,000 photos with it. Maybe more. Forget using the basic camera app your phone came with and check out these apps (plus an amazing website) that will make you wonder if you'll ever use a traditional camera again.
Pump it up this holiday season and channel your inner artistic self to make some truly fun and gorgeous photos that will make precious memories for your family even more meaningful.
The options offered in this powerful little app are staggeringly awesome. The minute I started using it I was hooked and my love of photography seriously grew. KitCam offers a choice of over 50 lenses, filters and frames plus has live filters with manual exposure and white balance options PLUS full HD video. I loved the option for manual controls and continuous shooting as well as the unique camera modes and shot editor. A nice feature of the editor is that it has “non-destructive” editing, which means that your original photo is always preserved. Using this amazing app is the next best thing to holding a Nikon SLR in your hands.
Hands down, with over 80 million users, Instagram is probably one of these most popular photography apps out there, and if you’re on Facebook or Twitter, chances are you’ve either used it or admired a photo by somebody who has used it. This app features a great range of tools to give your photos an amazing artistic edge, including custom filters, borders and effects. It’s super easy to connect and share your photos via social media and now that Instagram has given their users profile pages, you can now send the url of your page to anyone who is not on Twitter or Facebook and let them admire your works of art.
Camera+ is one of the first photography apps I started using when I got my very first iPhone (many moons ago), and I love the ability this app has to “pretty up” photos quickly and easily. You can give your photos great effects, control your shots and put an end to blurry photos with the stabilizer. Photos can be shared easily to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr or can be emailed straight from the app. Camera+ features a unique iCloud Lightbox sync, so you can shoot all day on your iPhone and then edit all night on your iPad. And yes, I do that a lot.
If you’re in the mood for some crazy artistic fun with your photos, Instaeffect FX is for you. With over 70 creative, artistic effects, this app creates amazing effects in quickly and easily. Photos can be shared via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr as well as an option to save it to your phone’s camera roll. I love this option because then it makes it very easy to submit to our local photo processor and get cool prints made as gifts.
Technology is a wonderful thing, but sometimes there’s nothing cooler than using tech to go retro. Hipstamatic is a very cool app that makes your digital photos look like they were taken with an old fashioned film camera. Right down to the graphic that shows the back of an old camera and square viewfinder, Hipstamatic is a trip back in time. (Yes, I am that old). Lenses, flash, and film (what’s that?) can be easily changed and give a great variety of options for your photos, plus photos can be easily shared to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Flickr.
Let your kids try this one and give them a history lesson—they’ll quickly learn how cool it is to be retro with their photos.
Now that you’ve used my five fave apps for taking photos, scoot on over to PicMonkey.com and just take a look at the creative awesomeness that you can achieve with your photos.
Seriously. Do this. You can thank me later.
PicMonkey.com is a free online photo editor that does not require any registration. Music to my ears. If you were a user of Picnik.com and cried when they were sold to the Google Giant, you’ll be happy to discover that PicMonkey.com has one of the most powerful, dynamic, easy to use and fun online photo editors available. And what’s even more amazing is that it’s run by a core team of less than a dozen people. They are my new best friends.
Soccer Mom, Golf Widow & Laundry Ninja in search of a quieter potato chip. When my kids were small, my favourite phrase of theirs was "I love you Mummy" but now that they're teens it's "How did you find that out?" My personal motto is "Be The Person Your Dog Thinks You Are" and that's mostly because my dog thinks I'm obviously the Smart Human who knows where the kibble is kept.
You can find me on Twitter at @Laundry_Ninja