by Stephen Terlizzi
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Done solely with Camera Plus Pro on iPhone

With the advent of digital photography, two types of photographers have emerged.  One who sees digital photography as a new form of communication - the communicator; this person simply takes photos and shares them quickly to friends and family through social networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr.  This person's relationship with photography pretty much ends at the shutter button and wants the camera to deliver decent photos with minimal effort. 

The second is someone who is serious with the craft of photography - the artist; this person is looking to create the best photographs possible, either for passion or money.

Digital photography isn't the only change; mobile digital photography has made a huge difference.  These days a person almost always has a camera available at a moment's notice.  Also, most recent camera phones can do video.  So where does a mobile phone camera fit in photography?  What do you need in a great mobile phone camera application? For the communicator, it is the ability to take a good photograph and make it easy to share quickly to social networks - such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa.  For the artist, you want to have some ability to do post-processing of the image, including cropping, exposure, color & sharpness adjustments, or geotagging.

Camera Plus Pro for the iPhone

Available for the iPhone, Camera Plus Pro by Global Delight comes the closest to a completely functional iPhone camera application. While it won't replace your DSLR, the camera application provides a great casual photo camera and will certainly take a greater share of your photos by enabling you to take ones that you may have not taken before.  The digital zoom functionality is very convenient with a slider on the main screen and it comes with autosave and anti-shake capabilities that can be turned on or off. 

One can add copyright information and a date stamp onto the photo - copyright is cool and date stamp is not.  Camera Plus Pro also has timer capability to 10 seconds and burst mode to 15 pictures.  For convenience, it comes with a rule of thirds grid and the ability to tap anywhere on the screen to take a photo.  Finally, it works in both portrait and landscape modes and has full tagging - both keyword and geotagging.

After the photo is taken it can be shared easily to your Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Picasa accounts as well as sent by email to friends and family.  Or you can choose to do some editing before.  One could brighten by simulating a flash, crop the image, rotate the image, apply contrast/sharpening/hue-saturation adjustments and apply preset filters.  The filters are your usual black & white, sepia, or infrared variety.

Global Delight also boasts that the application comes with a video capability.  While it is convenient to have a single application for both, I found the video quality to be inferior to Qik Video and Video Camera.  Maybe, Camera Plus Pro will improve the quality in future releases, but for now I am sticking with Video Camera.
 

Nitpicking items for future releases

There are some annoying aspects to the software that also should be fixed in future releases.  The saving to their Quick Roll is not very quick.  If you're trying to take multiple images of a fast child, then you're going to miss some shots.  Also, when you upload to Facebook, it can only place the images into a album called Camera Plus Pro Photos.  I would prefer to see the option to put it into an album of my choosing and not force their branding onto my Facebook page. Finally, the help system needs some improvement - the user interface, while impressive once you understand it, is confusing to start.

Recommendations

For the communicator, this application is a winner.  For the artist, it is an interesting tool to document and geotag a photo or video of a location that you shot.  You can use the latest version of HoudahGeo to geotag your DSLR photos by using a synchronized time with a geotagged iPhone photo from Camera Plus Pro.

An alternative to Camera Plus Pro ($1.99) in the App Store is Chase Jarvis' Best Camera ($2.99), but Camera Plus Pro definitely has more functionality.  With improvements to "save" time and the video quality, it could become the go-to camera/video app on my phone, but is definitely worth having today.