A B/W Photography App with Personality
I can not easily express how much I love this app. It reignited my dying love for digital photography and is the best thing on my iPhone. This is not the most fully featured or easiest to use camera app. It lacks many commonly expected features—e.g. volume shutter, video, color, independent exposure and focus control, zoom / access to the second and third lenses, a timer. It is idiosyncratic in its design and has a definite learning curve. For me, none of this detracts from it. For starters, it makes taking really beautiful b/w photos fun and easy. Beyond that, it is wonderful in unquantifiable ways. It has a distinct character the way a well crafted physical object like an old fixed lens film camera might have. It has amazing features like being able to test out color filters and film grain textures before even taking the shot. It has a great design aesthetic. It has limitations and those limitations make it beautiful. So many of our digital experiences these days have the frictionless un-designed sameness of an airport. I suppose that’s fine and good for a ride share app or an e-commerce site where you just want to achieve an end with minimal effort, but photography is an inherently romantic and artistic act. We deserve not only to create beautiful images but to do so in beautiful ways with beautiful tools. Hypocam achieves this. (To be clear, I welcome new features and updates, and trust that if and when they come, it will be with respect for what is already great about the app)