Tag Archives: lomo cameras

Taking Dramatic Black & White Photographs with the iPhone

Along with the iPhone camera, I also shoot with digital cameras and film cameras. While I love being able to do many levels of modifications to my iPhone photos, I enjoy the challenge of shooting with a few Lomo cameras too. The Lomo cameras have a very limited range of adjustments (usually a couple distance settings on the lens) and additionally limited in the quality of the equipment. The lenses are not perfect and even the film advance dials mean it is easy to create double exposures through planning or through forgetfulness. The fun with the cameras are in the area of taking the challenge of what will look good and what won’t when living in the limited world.

This weekend, I was shooting around San Francisco with my nephew. Several times he stated that he was switching his Android photo to take Black & White instead of color. Hmmm… my iPhone camera doesn’t have that setting!

Enter, Dramatic Black & white, an app for the iPhone photographer. When I grabbed the app, I was hoping it was going to force the photo through the iPhone camera be taken in Black & white, but the viewfinder screen shows color. I guess, that is what the real world film camera does too. Once the photo is taken or imported, it goes black & white from there forward.

Dramatic Black & White does offer a few fine tuning options, all around the visual impact of ‘non color’ photographs. Film speed, shutter speed, lens, etc… on a film camera it all causes the finished photo to be completely different. We are about with the app though to get to the same ending, but it is all done with adjustment sliders and filters. While most ‘filter’ apps offer two or three kinds of black & white effect, this app offers three full groups. As well, lighting eclipse and fine tuning of each filter.

I will post up a few screen shots I took of the app as soon as my iPhone Photo Stream picks them up. Meanwhile, here are a few from the developer of Dramatic Black & White:

Free iPhone Retro Camera with Film – Popular Lomo Cameras on your iPhone

I mentioned the Pudding social photo share service earlier. There is also a Pudding Camera, that seems to be a big secret. Non of my iPhone photographer friends seem to know anything about this fun little app.

Pudding Camera offers a variety of ‘retro’ cameras that you may recognize by their Lomo names. Also, instead of filters, the app has ‘film’ that gives the same effect as adding a filter. Choose a pair to use and snap away.

After photos are taken, they are added to a library within the Pudding Camera app. Go to the area via the thumbnail image in the lower corner. Photos are shown in an overview of thumbnails, opening a single image gives you info about the camera/lens used to capture the photo.

Swipe up/down on the left through the Lomo ‘like’ camera and across the film area for the different Pudding Camera film filters. The window showing the result of matching the camera/film together is nice.

 

The resulting Pudding Camera photo can be saved to the iPhone photo library or shared on the Pudding.To, Facebook and Twitter social services. Output photos are 1280 x 960.