I downloaded VSCOcam in early July, but hadn’t taken it for a proper test yet: one of those (many) impulse camera app purchases/downloads that I only rarely regret, as most are worth the free or $0.99 cost. I read that it was nice, simple, and powerful, and thought it might be a fun addition to my app arsenal, so I hadn’t put it in a folder, and instead, I made room for it on the photo app screen. (If I recall, it replaced the excellent Mextures app, which should really come out of the folder where it might have a chance of seeing some use…) I was all set to use it, I just hadn’t.
Then, maybe a week after I downloaded it, I read the 50 Things I Have Learned about Mobile Photography (and iPhone Photography) by Misho Baranovic (instagram @mishobaranovic) on the procamera blog. #35 stuck with me in ways others didn’t. Not that many of the others weren’t useful, it’s just that #35 was different somehow.
So fast-forward a couple of weeks to last Monday evening. I was chilling on the sofa, watching a lecture on Surah Fatiha, if I recall, and playing with the phone (gogo multitasking), when I spotted the app icon and thought “VSCO Cam is the new Hipstamatic.”
The photo above was the result, and it set off the week.
This isn’t a review of VSCOcam, really, and it isn’t a replacement for Hipstamatic, not in my world anyway. But it is a nice addition to the app arsenal, what with it’s Free price and nice collection of filters (and if you like the 5 or so free ones that come with the app, go ahead and drop the $6.00 to get the others: you likely won’t be disappointed, but you might be a bit overwhelmed (and the $5.99 for all the filter packs is on for a limited time… not sure how limited: it was limited on July 5 when I first looked at the app, and I bought the pack on July 20-somethingth, and it was still limited then, and it’s still limited as of this morning… maybe it’s going to go away in early August? Who knows.)). Plus, its camera module has separate focus and exposure controls, plus a white balance lock, and its editing screens allow control over exposure, white balance, contrast, rotate, and crop (and a host of others I found just now by scrolling to the right… sheesh… even more powerful than I thought).
Anyway. Everything was shot with the iPhone 5 via VSCOcam, and edited and processed in VSCOcam. Much of the EXIF is in the lightbox, but the preset filters are sadly missing. Perhaps they’ll appear in an update sometime. For reference, here are the filters I used, in order… S2, B4, C3, S6, F2, P4, F2… interesting that I used that F2 twice… wish I’d seen that before, I might’ve switched it up some.
You can find VSCOcam in the App Store. It’s worth the Free (and the extra filters are a nice addition, if a bit overwhelming at first, and you can probably get similar results out of the host of editing settings, and $6.00 isn’t nothing in the way that $0.99 is…).
Also: the title of this week’s 7/52 comes from a mis-remembered discussion of a portion of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque that we read in Performance Theory class… something about folding, enfolding, unfolding and identity… I don’t recall all the specifics, but after looking at that chapter again, I sorta want to read the whole book…
