Tag Archives: slow shutter

NightCap and iPhone, for those times you need low light photography

Previously, I’ve covered a ‘night’ camera app that did calculations to fill in the dark areas of photos. There was also the app that took a whole bunch of photos and merged them together to get a night image from a dark room. Now, NightCap is claiming they just went back to the basics and is controlling the shutter time open to get a true low light photo need handled. And to help you start using the app, the developers are currently offering their app for free.

Keeping the iPhone still to get a really good result is important, but NightCap seems to deliver on their claim of being able to keep the shutter open long enough to bring in all the light possible.

To assist in the capture, there are buttons to lock the focus, exposure and white balance. There is also a self timer to give you the ability to not have the press of the shutter button effect the shot through the slight movement of the iPhone.

Settings in NightCap lets you turn on/off the background alignment grid, geo-tagging, use the volume button as the shutter button, length of shutter opening and if you want to manually control versus full automatic.

Just so you know what the remote and table looked like without NightCap assisting:

All-in-one iPhone Photo app TopCamera kicks it up a notch with latest release

TopCamera is an app that ‘has it all’. It allows you to take pictures with Stabilizer, has a true multi image HDR, does burst photography shooting, slow shutter for low light and even  a timer to get yourself in the image. The only ‘negative’ for me so far is the user experience for editing photos within TopCamera. It has all the features to tune/enhance photos, it just isn’t very natural. What the app is for me is the single app to launch for just about any photo I need to take.

In the update, TopCamera lets’ you choose what the app launches with – the camera, image enhance area or ‘the last used’. Also in the update is smoother zooming, and more selective focusing if your shooting video. I may have missed that above, TopCamera does both photography and video recording… it really is that first app you launch when your in any visual recording situation, then think about how you want to save to share later.

Oh yea, and the new launcher icon update is really nice too!

Movement effects for your iPhone Photos

Prior to my iPhone, I carried a variety of digital cameras. While quick and easy to shoot, I missed a few features that almost seemed easier using my older film cameras. Movement in an image was one of those features. The ‘better’ digital cameras did movement but the entry level units froze everything in time.

For the iPhone, there is Slow Shutter. Do you want to show movement going by like water over a waterfall or car taillights on the street below, it gets that handled.

Slow Shutter handles the other side of movement too… like a picture out the window of a plane or car where the foreground frame is still and the background moves by. The app provides a manual mode for you to completely control the shutter open time as well an automated option where you choose a length of time and how you want the movement handled and Slow Shutter does the rest. There is a single image result but the app holds many images that you can move through to adjust the final… like in the case of cars going by you can adjust at what point in the capture had the right amount of light trails.