Some time ago, I mused on some of Apple’s patents and acquisitions that may soon lead in to iPhones taking pictures with a bit of Time Lord technology to them, but, what if that’s already here?

There are some great new apps that have landed over the last few months that are asking us to change our perceptions on photography. Taking pictures has made the iPhone the camera of the world (it’s the most used on Flickr) and has awards for photos taken using it.

Consider that a photo has kept much the same since it was invented nearly 200 years ago. All of the biggest developments have been about the single spinet of a still moment in time, captured and kept. 200 years later, surely, there should be something more we can do? Well, yes, there is! And I’m going to show you some of what’s available.

Seene

Seene got my attention last year with it’s pitch of being the Instagram of 3D images. Yep, 3D, the buzz word of cinema and tv from the last 3 years, Seene takes things in a different light. When you take a picture with Seene, you move the camera around your subject in 4 directions. The app then maps the depth of the image from these pictures and creates an image than can be panned and titled around to create a seemingly three dimensional image. It does this by registering the movements of your phone’s accelerometer.

Seene is free and worth playing with.

 Moju

Moju arrived on the web quite recently and has a different take on the ‘mini-movie’. You capture up to 24 frames and when your image is processed, you pan your phone from left to right to move forwards and backwards through the image. It’s a bit like a GIF with manual controls. Interestingly, you can do something similar to Seene when you move round and object and create a 3D effect. Alternatively, you can create a panorama that you can move from one end to the other, simply by moving your device.

Moju is also free and available here.

Currently, you can’t embed Moju images, so you’ll have to live with the picture above and this link!

 

Those are some of the things you can do with software right now. Things like selective focus to create Lyto like effects have started to come loaded on Android devices and will make it’s way round the digital ecosystems over the next year.

There’s also some great hardware already out there. We’ve mentioned the Lytro before, but one of the most innovative mobile cameras is the Nokia 1020. Using it’s 41 mega-pixel sensor, some great images can be captured, but if you have 50 of them, you can do something like this:

“Living Moments” – NYC streets frozen in time from Paul Trillo on Vimeo.

Photography is evolving relatively slowly but in that evolution, there are many different ideas being displayed and innovative ideas being given time to grow. It’s a great time for photography and the best is yet to come.