iPhone Photography App Review: Big Lens

Is Big Lens the new Instagram or just the coolest iPhone photo app released to date?

The photo above -- I just took that using my iPhone and then retouching (on the iPhone) with Big Lens. I changed my depth of field, isolated the Converse Digital business card and then applied a photo filter to give it a bit of tone. All in about 30 seconds.

And all with my iPhone 4.

Here is the original shot (which I cropped using Photogene):

As you can see, the photo is completely in focus, like every iPhone shot. There is no opportunity to create a depth of field on an iPhone, until Big Lens came along.

I have a bunch of iPhone photography apps and I spend a good deal of time playing with and looking for more in my quest to explore the content marketing capabilities of the iPhone.

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Speaking of using an iPhone to create killer blog content -- if you're going to be at BlogWorldLAX this week, I'm giving a presentation on using your iPhone to create awesome blog content. Stop by and if you're not registered yet -- use Martin20 as your discount code (good for 20% off).

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Photo App Review

The app is 99 cents in the app store and the interface is simple. There is a basic function -- which gives  you the ability to set the focus point using a circle (as I did here) or using a horizontal plane (rectangle). My only beef here is that the rectangle extends the entire photo like on a TiltShift app, and in this case, having the ability to just isolate the card with a rectangle would have been cool.

For users that want/need a really high degree of control, there is the advanced function, which lets you isolate any particular area of the photo. It takes a little practice, but you can actually outline the object you want to have in focus and the rest of the photo will go out of focus.

You can also change the f-stop setting from 3.5 to 1.8, which is how you get the blurred background. Lastly, there are a bunch of Instagram type filters that you can add to the photo too.

There is also a handy "compare" button that when pressed shows you the original photograph that you took using the iPhone. This is really handy for seeing the before and after to determine how far you want to go with your editing.

Sharing your iPhone pictures

Sharing is one-click away. The app can save your new photo to your camera roll or you can share directly from the app via eMail, or upload to Facebook, Picasa and Dropbox. I really like the Dropbox integration, which would make it easy for a field photographer to shoot and upload to a home office based blogger that then uses the photos in content marketing creation, like blogs. NOTE: you have to save it to your camera roll if you want the photo in the future. The app seems to keep your retouched photo in some kind of cache that is only available to the app if you don't. 

Best Uses for this photo app

After playing with the app, I have to say it's just perfect for food bloggers, tourism bloggers, restaurant blogs and home decor or real estate blogs/bloggers. Can you think of any other bloggers that would benefit from such an app?

And when you combine the focus and filter effects with the ability to crop shots via other iphone photo apps like Photogene (or in the native app on the new iOS5) the iPhone continues to show itself as an outstanding content marketing creation tool.

So what do you think? Is this the coolest iPhone photography app you've seen? If not, what is... let me know!

 

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