Home   >   Apps   >   Upgrade Your iPhone Camera for Free

Upgrade Your iPhone Camera for Free

By on February 11, 2010

Gorillacam is a free iPhone app from Joby, the folks that make the glorious Gorillapod “tripods” for cameras and mobile devices.  (I’ll review the gorillapods themselves later but I wanted to get the word out about this great app first.) This app is incredible.  It adds eight great features to any iPhone camera and it does it all for the outstanding price of FREE!

As you can see from the screen capture, it adds six easy to control features.  Most of them can be used regardless of whether or not you have the iPhone gorillapod.  Let’s take a look…

1.  Self-Timer: This feature allows you to set up a shot and then actually get in the shot.  Once active, you can set how long you want the timer to run before shutter fires.  Also, in the settings section you can turn on a warning beep that will go off just before the pic it taken.
2.  Time-Lapse: This allows you to take pictures over time.  You can determine how often a photo is taken.  It’s cool but I’m not sure how useful it is without a gorillapod to keep everything absolutely still.
3.  Anti-Shake: Like the anti-shake feature found on my digital cameras, this just minimizes movement of the camera to eliminate blurriness.
4.  Bubble Level: Want to make sure your shot is perfectly level?  Well, this feature adds a small bubble level to the top of the view screen.   Very nice.  You have do have to calibrate it once before you use it though.
5.  Grid: Every photographer eventually learns about the Rule of Thirds.  I won’t go into that here but this feature actually overlays a grid on the view screen which can help you visualize the thirds easily as you compose your shot.
6.  Press Anywhere: This is the best feature of them all and I’d add this app to my iPhone for this feature alone.  When this is activated, it allows you to take a picture by pressing anywhere on the screen.  (Cue the angelic choirs!)  That might not sound like much but if you’re ever tried to take a picture of yourself (or anything else that requires a weird angle) you’ve probably be tempted to curse Steve Jobs for making us use only a tiny little button at the bottom of the screen to fire the “shutter”.  I’ve never understood that design flaw or why it hasn’t been fixed in iPhone OS updates.  Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it anymore with the help of this handy feature.
7.  Three Shot Burst: takes bursts of photos back-to-back.  This is cool if you’re trying to get a photo of some action or something that’s moving fast.
8.  Zoom: Hidden in the settings section you’ll see a place to activate the zoom feature.  Once you turn that on, the you’ll have a little slider on the view screen that allows you to zoom in an out digitally.

Overall the app works great.  There is a slight delay as it writes the photos to the camera roll but other than that it’s flawless.

Check it out here.

Read previous post:
Give Your Next Presentation a Jolt

Even in this media savvy world in which we live there are still times when you're going to have to...

Close