For this week’s 7/52, I decided to pit two toy camera apps against one another: Plastica, the relative newcomer, vs. the venerable Hipstamatic.
For the most part, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves and leave a proper review of Plastica for a time when I have more time to devote to it.
First, though, here’s the setup I used.
- I sat down somewhere, or found something to lean against.
- I opened Hipstamatic, with the ‘shake to randomize’ function turned on, and took 10 (more or less) shots with random settings.
- I switched to Plastica and also shot 10 frames, changing lenses & films between shots, and wishing it too had a shake-to-randomize feature. (That said, the way lenses and films are stored in Plastica—a drawer metaphor—makes switching much faster than Hipstamatic, but I doubt I was as random as Hipstamatic’s shake-to function.)
I did not use any of Plastica’s fancy features—the separate exposure/focus in full-screen mode, the tilt-shift effect, the zoom, or the import—to make things a bit more even.
I’ll try to work up a review of Plastica, but in the mean time, Life in Lo-Fi some good coverage of the original version and the much-improved 2.0 release, if you’re interested. (I used the 2.0 and only picked up the app after the second review came out.)
If you want to try to guess which app made which picture, the answer will be in the exif.
And I intended to share 14 pictures—2 each of 7 scenes—but failed to sit somewhere with an interesting-enough scene for long enough before I left for vacation. Shame on me.
Plastica and Hipstamatic are available in the App Store. Both have in-app purchases of lens/film combinations. Hipstamatic runs $1.99, Plastica is currently free (but will likely be in the $.99 to $1.99 range at some point).
