Take Photo

Noel Chenier came up with a great idea for a new Twitter hashtag - I interviewed him this week to tell us all about it.

Since 1997, I have been a photojournalist for the provincial newspaper in New Brunswick, Canada. For almost the same time, I have been teaching a broad range of photography courses for both the general public as well as university and college level. I got into app developing as a way to keep my students inspired by coming up with my LearnPhoto365 app. Developing those apps really got me into mobile photography. For anyone who might be interested in the process of making apps, they might want to check out my blog, Adventures of a Newb App Developer.

I decided to start this in the hopes of getting exposure for some great photo apps. As an app developer myself, I know how hard it can be to spread the word about your app, with so many apps on the store today. I thought it might be a good opportunity for everyone, not just photographers, to share their favorite apps. Hopefully, some of which are lesser known and could use the exposure! While I haven't confirmed with any developers, according to the apps analytics service App Annie, almost all the apps mentioned in the first #photoappfriday did see a bump in downloads. Hoping that continues to happen!

I shoot mainly with my Nikon SLR, but I do take a lot of images with my iPhone 4. The quality is great, and it's always on me. But I also like importing SLR images into a variety of apps and working on them and of course sharing them.

I really like ProCamera and Camera+ for shooting. For black and white conversion, Monokrom is my go to app - it has a unique interface. Snapseed is a great editor, and of course it's free. But being an SLR photographer, I also really like Adobe Photoshop Touch on the iPad. And for a unique one, I really love Pixol, a fun and challenging Instagram photo puzzle app.

My first suggestion is to get a camera app that allows for separate exposure and focus.  Apple has made a lot of improvements in their camera app for iOS 7 and the iPhone 5, but for anyone who uses an SLR or wants more controls, they will want to get another app for shooting.

After that, it just depends on what kind of controls they want and what kind of things they might like to do with their images. There are great apps for selfies, long exposure, night photography, HDR...A whole range of creative things to do with your images with filters, combining images, painting effects, adding text, design, etc...useful apps for resizing, collecting, sharing, learning and inspiration.

The sky is the limit with iPhoneography and I would encourage people to experiment and have fun! Many of these apps do have free versions that photographers can download to try them out, so I'd suggest they download as many free apps as they can, and buy the full versions of the ones they like. There are so many great resources on the web (like Art of Mob, Mobitog, Life in LoFi) where you can find info and reviews on apps, so Google will be a great place to start their search.

I just hope people take part by sharing their favorite apps, telling everyone about the hashtag and encouraging them to take part.