Capturing the magic of imperfection with iPhone camera apps

My Facebook page is filled with new comments: "Wow, that is a great photo!" "I can't believe you still have a Holga!" "You're still shooting slides?" "Where do you get Polaroid film?" "You have a darkroom?"

Well, not exactly.

My photographer friends' comments are a testament to something we have all lost in the digital age: the magic of an imperfect photograph. Like many professionals today, I started with film and toy cameras and developed my photographs in a darkroom. Many of my most cherished images had a magical quality, brought about by plastic lenses, light leaks, cross processing, slides, chemicals, and other tricks and imperfections of film photography. In the digital age, razor-sharp, light-balanced, crisp-edged photos are the norm. Those magical, happy accidents of film are all but lost today.

My Facebook photography friends are universally disappointed to find out that the photos (seen here, at right) are from an iPhone, but are nostalgically appreciative nonetheless. Perhaps it's because I always have it on me, but my iPhone has become my de facto camera for almost everything (besides professional shoots). A few months ago I started exploring the camera apps on iTunes, and have delighted the Facebook choir and myself with the ability of certain apps to capture the experimental feel of yesterday.

Most of these effects can be obtained with a little knowledge of Photoshop. But it's hard to beat the immediacy of these apps, which give you the ability to turn your shot of the beach into something timeless or a picture of your dog into art. These are a few of my favorite iPhone camera apps.

Lo-Mob

If you are a fan of the "retro" look, Aestesis' Lo-Mob (lo-mob.com, $2) is an encyclopedia of vintage film and camera effects. It boasts more than 30 settings and takes only a few taps to reproduce the physical look of color slides, through-the-viewfinder (TTV) experimentation, contact prints, various emulsions, wide formats (6 x 6, 6 x 9), medium formats, photo cards, instant film and other techniques that took darkroom dinosaurs hours to create. These rich effects mimic changes of saturation, focus and tint, as well as the individual quirks of various camera formats. For added realism, artifacts and imperfections, such as dust, scratches, vignetting and frames are selectively added to the photos.

Like many of my favorite apps, Lo-Mob gives you the option to shoot a photo or recall one from your library, and then quickly generates multiple preprocessed thumbnails from which to choose. Additionally, Lo-Mob gives you a choice of selectively adding and subtracting slide borders, instant-film borders and the vintage filter itself for a wealth of retro choices. Images can be saved in full resolution or quickly converted to web-friendly formats for Facebook, Twitter or e-mail.

Hipstamatic

As is true of many photographers, my first camera was a cheap plastic one, but that toy helped me develop a lifelong love of photography. When you open Synthetic's Hipstamatic (hipstamaticapp.com; $2), you quickly forget you are holding an iPhone. At launch, the display rotates horizontally and becomes the back of a toy camera — suddenly you're 10 years old again. A 1:1 square viewfinder appears in the middle of the screen, along with a shutter release, an analog camera flash slide and even a small window to display your "film" selection.

Hipstamatic not only reproduces the look and feel of a simpler past, but also paints beautifully unpredictable photographs with its use of oversaturation, discoloring, blurring and vignetting. Photos easily become artistic accidents that never cease to surprise.

Hipstamatic comes with a quirky "Standard Equipment" pack consisting of three lenses (John S, Jimmy, Kaimal Mark II) and three film styles (Ina's 1969, Kodot Verichrome, Blanko) for a variety of borders and colors and a dreamy Dreampop Flash. Additional packs of effects are available in the unique in-app Hipstamart store to add more individuality to your photos. Like Lo-Mob, images can be uploaded directly to Facebook and Flickr, or they can be e-mailed.

Dash of Color

My shaky hands and lack of patience always made hand-coloring black-and-white photographs by brush a difficult task, but it was an effect I adored. Thinking Drone's Dash of Color (freetheapps.com) is a free iPhone app that allows selective coloring of a photo with your fingertips. Choose an image from your library, and Dash of Color will convert it to grayscale. From there, simply finger-paint the areas you want to resaturate with color. If you make a mistake, simply paint with black and white to take out the color. This simple app makes for some surprisingly good images, especially if combined with other camera app effects.

CrossProcess

If you ever "accidentally" put your color slide film through the C-41 processor in the hopes of creating stunning color, then GoBanana-Apps' CrossProcess (crossprocessapp.com; $1) might be the app for you. It uses red, green and blue filters to emulate different film stocks and processes. The delicious array of filter effects makes your images unique in color and contrast.

ShakeItPhoto

Though rather silly, the "fauxlaroid" app called ShakeItPhoto (shakeitphoto.com; $1), which mimics an old-school instant camera, turns out to be a lot of fun. You shoot a picture with the normal iPhone camera interface; then a Polaroid image comes sliding onto the screen as if it were rolling out of your vintage Polaroid SX-70. To add to the fun, you shake the iPhone for faster Polaroid development (cue Outkast's "Hey Ya" breakdown). Once it's developed, you are left with surprisingly retro-realistic, 1,040 x 1,016-pixel framed images that will remind you of your favorite '70s family photo album.

Format 126

Named after Kodak's cartridge-based film format of the '60s and '70s, Chris Cornair's Format 126 (flickr.com/groups/format126/; free) converts your iPhone images into Instamatic-like 28mm-square, low-end, point-and-shoot snapshots. The app offers three monochrome-film filters to mimic the super-fast films of the era, four subtle color emulations (ColorPlus is particularly pleasing, adding a small amount of contrast and saturation), and all the vignetting, bordering and square formatting from the old Kodak 126 days. Settings are easily switched off and on, allowing you to mix and match formats with film options.

CameraBag

I've often been seen carrying around my SLR and an assortment of vintage cameras. Of course, this isn't the best for your back (or your wallet), but to the rescue comes the travel-friendly CameraBag (nevercenter.com/camerabag; $2). This app uses 12 filters to simulate vintage cameras (such as the Helga, Lolo and Fisheye) and various historical film styles (instant, magazine, mono, color cross, cinema, 1862, silver and infrared). Images are shot within the application or selected from your iPhone library; it is very easy to flick between filter previews and image outputs and save to a customizable range of 600 to 1,200 pixels.

These are just a few of the literally hundreds of camera apps for the iPhone, each with its own ability to add a little fun, playfulness and retro magic. Now if someone would just make a Fisher-Price PXL2000 emulator for the iPhone video camera, I might never stop smiling.