Nov132012November 13, 2012November 13, 20120 Commentby Brian DeFrees

iPhone Road Trip Photo Apps | Travel Tools

Travel Tools | iPhone Road Trip Photo Apps

If I could only choose two items to take with me on a road trip, one would be my car and the other would be my camera. Photographs are the best way to capture parts of the world you’ve never seen before and may never see again. Even though I own several DSLR’s, my favorite camera is the one that’s always in my pocket: my iPhone. One of the advantages of shooting photos with a smart phone is being able to review your geo-tagged photos after the trip. Here’s what it looks like in the Places map in iPhoto for Mac:

There are hundreds of photo applications in the Apple app store. In this post I’m going to focus on the seven I use most frequently.

Camera + ($0.99)

Camera + is my favorite iPhone road trip photo app. It acts as an alternative to the built in camera app, allowing you to take photos from within the application with more features such as a stabilizer, timer and burst modes. It also allows you to set your exposure and focus separately, which is a huge advantage over the built-in camera. My favorite part of the app is the editing tool which has dozens of effects to chose from as well as cropping, border and scene selection options. This iPhone camera app makes it very easy to take a normal photo and make it more unique in just a few seconds.

Pro HDR ($1.99)

Pro HDR is an excellent iPhone road trip photo app that really makes your photos pop. If you aren’t familiar with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, what it does is basically merge an underexposed (dark) image and an overexposed (light) image into one photo. For instance in a landscape photo it would take the sky from the under exposed photo and merge it with the ground from the over exposed photo. The built in iPhone camera does have an HDR option but I rarely use it since it doesn’t achieve the results that Pro HDR does.

Fisheye Lens ($1.99)

Fisheye Lens is a great iPhone road trip photo app for easily achieving a wide angle fisheye look in your photos. It has lots of lenses to choose from and allows you to control how much of the fish-eye “warp” effect you want to use.

Pano ($1.99)

Pano is an excellent iPhone road trip photo app for shooting panorama photography. It’s very easy to use and allows you to capture entire landscapes if you are outside or interiors inside since a normal photo’s dimensions are too small to capture wide scenes. The iPhone 5 comes with a Panorama feature built in which achieves the same results, but if you have an older iPhone or an Android, Pano is an excellent application to use for road trip Panorama shots.

Big Lens ($0.99)

Big Lens is an iPhone road trip photo app that realistically gives your iPhone photos the depth of field effect that a DSLR camera would with an expensive lens. By selecting the area you would like to keep in focus with your finger, Big Lens blurs out the rest of the photo leaving you with a professional depth of field look to your photos. It even lets you choose your aperture and lens within the app so you have total control of how much of the shot you want to be in focus. It also has some nice filters and an HDR option to polish your photos.

Slow Shutter ($0.99)

Slow Shutter is another iPhone road trip photo app that gives you the control and ability of a professional DSLR camera’s shutter speed control. You choose the shutter speed so you can blur objects that are moving in your image. Another cool feature is the “Light Trail” capture mode which allows you to create light trails with bright objects against dark backgrounds in your photos.

PicFrame ($0.99)

Pic Frame is an excellent iPhone road trip photo app for putting multiple photos into one image. If you follow me on Instagram (@DeFrees) you’ve seen me use this app to summarize photos from my road trips into one image to represent one day of the trip or the photos taken from one city to another. There are dozens of layouts to choose from as well as sizes, effects, and other various controls that allow you to place the images exactly how you want them.