Bringing action to your photography sometimes is not the easiest task. Shooting multiple exposures and showing them in sequence is one of the tricks that allows static images to convey the feeling of motion to the viewer. Differently from animation, which is at its core founded on the same principles, this kind of photography still conveys the original idea of stillness which is proper of photographs.
ClassicSAMP by misskiwi will help you in bringing action to your iPhone photos by providing you with a neat collection of effects and colored filters in the toycam style, a stylish and easy interface and just the right amount of customizability for an app of its kind.
Main Features
- Full resolution available (but check review for in-depth resolution description);
- 6 camera effects;
- 14 film simulations;
- Set shooting speed;
- Share via email and Facebook.
Appotography Opinion
ClassicSAMP is an app that brings together the features of a multi-shot with those of misskiwi’s ClassicTOY camera. The app offers a rich variety of options in the assortment both of formats and filters. You have six different cameras — from two to nine shots — and many films covering a range of possibilities which include classic and high contrast black and white, sepia, overly saturated and lomo-like colors, overexposed, etc. Randomly generated light leaks are a cool extra to reinforce the toycam feel of this app.
The films and some of the cameras featured in this app are also included in ClassicTOY, so if you have ClassicTOY already and you are not especially into multi-shots, you won’t gain much from getting ClassicSAMP as well.
After choosing your camera and film, you can also adjust the shooting speed. If you want more freedom in composing your photo without being forced to follow the timer’s limitations, you can decide to select the manual mode, which allows you to press the shutter button for each separate shot.
From what I could see, the app doesn’t have any major issue, and in fact it is quite fun and pleasing to use, but I found the way resolution is handled a little confusing. You can choose to save your photos at small, medium or high resolution, but formats differ slightly depending on the effect applied. I tested the app on 3GS: with both the CLS TRIPO and with the CLS POP effects I found the resolution of processed photos to be once saved unusual, to say the least. While applying all the other effects on 3GS gives you images at 960×640, 1200×800 and 2048×1366 pixels, the aforementioned effects save respectively at 960×642, 1200×801 (TRIPO) and 1200×798 (POP), 2048×1368 (TRIPO) and 2049×1368 (POP). The fact the difference is one or two pixels only made me think maybe it wasn’t intentional. This issue is perhaps not too interesting in practice, but I still found it to be quite… unexpected. Thus I thought about sharing my experience.
ClassicSAMP works quite well for multi-shot photography purposes. The effects are nicely done, processing times are very reasonable and, although being familiar with other apps by the same developer probably made things easier for me to understand right away, the UI of this app is quite intuitive even to a newbie.
Even if personally I am not very passionate about multi-shot cams, I think ClassicSAMP is an app that will please fans of the genre and those who are willing to take advantage of this kind of photography for their creative projects.
Overall
Name: ClassicSAMP
Developer: misskiwi
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch. iOS 4.1 or later.
Price: £1.19||$1.99||€1.59
Vote: 4/5
The new filters bring yet more variety in the already rich combination of effects of ClassicSAMP camera.