Camera Phones part 3

To review: my Mototola Photon Q phone has a very nice native phone app. I downloaded the Silent Camera app, which is like a different camera. Then I downloaded Fotor to edit pictures, and I discovered it has a pretty nice integrated camera That's a little different from the other two. Which got me thinking about the cameras in my other apps. Instagram has one, of course, and Facebook does too. They are both simple. Here is Instagram's camera.

Twitter, Tumbler and blogger all have camera buttons, but they seem to use the native camera. The advantage to using the native camera from one of these apps is that the photo immediately appears in the app where it was opened. For example, if you start a new post in Tumblr, and take a photo, it immediately goes in to your post. No need to take the photo, the share it in to Tumbler or start Tumbler and import it in. In summary, don't get too caught up using your native camera as the only camera in your phone. It depends what features you need, and where you want your picture to end up. You have lots of options.

Camera Phones part 2

In my last post I talked about downloading the Silent Camera app, and discovering that Silent Camera gave me at least one different feature than my native camera. Next I downloaded an app called Fotor, which I wanted to use to edit photos. It's like Instagram editing on steroids. It has many more features to edit photos. Nice! So I was taking photos with my native camera, then importing them to Fotor to edit them. But then I noticed Fotor has its' own camera. You can open Fotor, and use the camera to take photos, which are immediately in Fotor for editing. No need to open the native camera and do that dumb import process! The Fotor camera has some neat features, including "big button", which makes the entire screen be the shutter button, so you can tap anywhere to take the shot.

So here's yet another camera for my phone! But wait, there are more, and each one is different!

Your Camera Phone

Let's talk about camera phones. In the olden days, cameras were cameras. You would take photos that would be saved on your camera, and then you would use a cable or card reader to transfer the photos to your Computer. You saved all your photos on memory cards or your hard drive. When camera phones came along, they were used the same way. Photos were saved on your phone, and then transferred to your Computer. But phones soon allowed you to send your photo via email or MMS. You could share your photos from your phone without transferring them to your PC first. In the mean time, online databases like Facebook, various Google products, Flickr, Instagram and Dropbox, gave you on line storage where you could stash your photos. Now those technologies have merged, and you can automatically transfer your photos to an online storage space immediately while you are taking photos. These days I use Flickr to save my photos, and an app called Flickr Uploader on my phone to automatically upload all my photos as I take them.

I use my phone's camera to take these photos, which seems obvious, but hold that thought. My camera phone takes really nice photos, and has some features such as a real nice panorama mode.

One crazy thing about my Motorola Photon Q's camera is that it makes a really loud shutter sound. Taking a picture sounds like a bear breaking a horse's femur. And you can't turn the sound off! In a quite banquet or during some sort of silent observance, it is extremely irritating. I discovered this is because my camera is sold in South Korea,where there is a law that requires cameras to make a sound, I guess for privacy concerns. I discovered a workaround by downloading Silent Camera, which doesn't make a sound.

Notice that Silent Camera has some different controls compared to my native camera. It doesn't have panorama mode, but it does have a strange mode called "serial shot" which takes a shot every half second or so until you turn it off. This got me thinking about my camera, and whether the camera really is the camera. Stay tuned.

Hands on House Half Marathon 2013