Cap my...Photo Review-Photo Captioning for iPhone

Cap My Photo...Plus

The iPhone in all its variations, including the soon to be released iPhone 5, has always had a camera to be proud of. But what about the apps to go with that iOS camera?

Cap my ...Photo seeks to bring some fun into your mobile camera experience. Much has been said about the 5 element lens and low light features of the latest iPhone camera, but the fact remains that no matter how good your picture is ,if it doesn't have that certain flair and attraction it's going to be yet another picture of a sleeping baby or banal birthday party. 

By taking pictures with Cap my...Photo (or using a previously snapped pic from the gallery) you'll have access to a bunch of fun features. With a few photo frames on offer to enhance your images the apps main selling point is the captions that it randomly assigns to your photos. Here's the lowdown on the caption app: You'll select a photo and it will assign a caption to it. That's the basic premise fleshed out with a few photo frames, font and text colour choices. You'll then be able to take that captioned photo and share it in the normal email and social network ways. 

The app has a low pricepoint and is currently on sale which is a definite plus. Hundreds of captions are promised which certainly adds a bit of fun to your iphone photography. For a budget app it's certainly worth a few laughs but could be upgraded with a few more features and perhaps a menu to select captions based on genre or even quotations from movies and other famous sources. 
Cap My...Photo Link

Camera and Portrait innovations for your Smartphone

A short time in the past if you went to a games arcade you could quite happily spend a few dollars having your portrait caricatured by a Camera machine with cutting edge portrait innovations, this would give you some very amusing portrait photography in the form of Water colours, cartoon style and (gasp) even a Michelangelo style. These weren't the best cameras either and you would certainly pay for the privilege of having this throwaway photo mementoe.


And in a very short space of time we have moved dramatically on! As now we have the ability to take, via our Smartphone cameras, any type of portrait in whatever style we want! It's not all gravy though as some phones of course have better cameras than others here's some stats on what are some of the most renowned  cameras on phones are at the moment:

Despite their ailing fortunes Nokia still produces some of the best cameras for phones with all sources agreeing that the Nokia N8 has the best camera ( 12mp Autofocus with a Carl Zeiss camera Lens) 

Everyone expected the iPhone 5 to come out and blow away its predecessors and were slightly disappointed that they had to settle for the iPhone 4s , which was very similar to the 4 , where it is a vast improvement though is on the phone's camera which is now an 8mp autofocus, being a big improvement on the original 5 mp, the camera app opens straight from the lock screen making speedy photography easier and also offers better low-light shots.

Apples biggest and most current rival is the well regarded Samsung Galaxy S II which also sports an 8mp camera which is great for outdoor shots and a very crisp screen to view the photos on.

With all these great cameras you need to do something a bit more special than your bog standard photos, so here are some of the best and most innovative portrait apps out at the moment to make the most of your smartphones and keep your dollars out of the arcade camera booths.


I've come across a superb photo gallery on Mashable from which I'm going to feature a few photographs and links to the apps and software used to create them. Of note is that these are all photos taken using the iPhone. Incredible photography , the whole article can be read on Mashable

Train Passenger by Peter Davis

Unbelievably snapped on a normal mornings train travel to work, the photo has been enhanced using Mill Colour a renowned app from an award winning visual effects company that allows you to manipulate an image to achieve the desired colour effect. Recommended by many professional photographers.

Mr Melancholy by Anton Kawasaki

Incredible to think that such unique portraiture is a product of a camera phone, the broodiness of this portrait is enhanced with 
CameraBag :allowing many different camera filters to be applied such as:

LOLO-Giving vibrant colourful shots

Italiano-with coffee hues

and many more filters, also with customization and reprocessing features.

What about some colour Gametrender?

Okay , thank Amy-Mae Elliot for this then and those crazy fools Bryan and Ola as photographed by Jim Darling

And that is why Smartphones cameras are awesome-when combined with the right apps and an artistic eye. What can you create? You're welcome to add your best-and worst- efforts in the comments section.

(Thanks to Amy-Mae Elliot for her brilliant Mashable article)

Now if serious photography is not your thing then amuse yourselves with this Cartoonize App

This and many more camera apps are freely available on iTunes.

Famous Photographers show off their Pictures on iPhone

iPhone: Helping us make sense of our times

Siri, what's happening here?

NYC-Daily Blog-features NYC as seen via iPhone lens

Soon to be famous iPhone 5 test photo?

Before iPhone , Nokia cameras ruled the world-this is worth checking out

Carrying on in the spirit of our recent coverage of photo apps we 're going to look into what famous photographers have been able to do with their pictures of note on iPhone.

Apparently the majority of Flickr upload pictures come from iPhones and since the brilliant iPhone 4s and it's renowned camera have been released that's all too sure to increase. What with the ability to resize pictures and edit pictures it's no surprise that the 'Polaroid for 2011/2012' is so popular. So what famous photo can you expect to see on this innovative phone camera?

Famous pictures taken on iPhone is actually a big topic in the news at the moment with people instantly becoming famous photographers by being in the right place at the right time: Take Stefanie Gordon for example who shot what would instantly become a world famous picture, after it was twittered, of the Space Shuttle launch.

Thanks to Stefanie Gordon we can appreciate the Shuttle launch as seen from an aeroplane.

Literally overnight she became a famous photographer and even earned some money from her opportune picture ( many would argue not enough as her famous photo was so widely circulated and not even acknowledged by some very large news companies)


Another accidentally famous photographer is Janis Krums who was again in the right place at the right time to take this photograph:

Janis Krums' 'There's a plane in the Hudson River'

The lesson to be learned here is with our iPhones and other smart phones being constantly with us and with the instant ability to edit pictures, resize pictures and indeed upload pictures: whether that be to Twitter; Facebook or to a personal email address everyone has the ability to take a great content photograph and get the news scoop which could potentially land them in the fame and fortune bracket.

These and more famous pictures taken from mobile phones are increasingly featured across the internet and are rapidly becoming a modern art form if you have a Smartphone then please join in. Gametrender welcomes any efforts you make with iPhone and Android photography and will happily share your work via our comments or even a dedicated article if your photos are awesome!

Best Photography and Photoshop for your Android

Our recent iPhone Photography articles have been really popular so let's share with our Android users too, what's the closet Photoshop type app that can be found on Android?


Believe it or not Adobe Photoshop is itself actually available for Android! With the rise of digital photography and Smartphone Cameras improving all the time , it was just a matter of time before professional photography suites made their way onto Android. So whether you're using your Android to improve a photography blog or are just looking to enquire further about online photoshop then carry on reading.

Recently released for Adobe Photoshop Express for Android is a stripped down version of the desktop photoshop product specially designed for Android .

It allows swift manipulation of photographs with expected features such as crop, straighten , adjust colour etc. all easily accessible from your phone's touchscreen.


Being very Smartphone savvy Adobe makes it easy to share your pictures with social media sites like Facebook and Twitpic (very useful as many of my nights-out pictures sent from my Android phone have looked positively garish)


Another useful feature is the online Photoshop.com account that negates your phone's limited storage and takes your photos to the cloud allowing quick uploading to Adobe servers.

But that's only part of the story! Adobe has just released a suite of Android Tablet Applications that will take the use of Photoshop for Android to the next level.

Photoshop Touch for Android

Introducing ADOBE PHOTOSHOP TOUCH:It's with only a small stretch of the imagination that the possibilities of a Photoshop tablet app become apparent. After all with our phones smaller screens and somewhat limited processing power they won't be able to compete with the finesse of this picture manipulation app on Android tablets that have decidely bigger screens and more power.

The app features core features from the desktop version of the graphical suite but of course adds to those by using Photoshop features designed for tablet such as layers and selection tools.


Like the Android phone app images can be swiftly shared to Facebook and others. Another useful feature that would be hard for desktop photo manipulation software to emulate is the ability of the app to integrate the tablet's camera for various fill-in features. Again as with the Android Smartphone app the Adobe tablet version can also upload and backup to the Adobe Creative Cloud. As is expected many tutorials and videos accompany this high profile Android tablet Photoshop. 

Naming Apps WYSIWYG

Have you ever wondered where these app get their names from?The Android Market and rivals are inundated with apps so it's interesting to see some of the marketing strategies that are coming out from app developers in a very congested market. Of course major app developers always have a trick or two up their sleeve and Sony has come up with an Ace of Spades by quite simply naming one of their new apps with a foolproof name that does exactly what it says on the packaging Video Trimmer. What does the app do, trim videos of course! https://market.android.com/details?id=com.sonydna.videotrimmer. The Video Trimming app has many rave reviews and is well worth checking out.
Superb marketing by Sony, wysiwyg(what you see is what you get) is strangely enough a concept not properly explored in the App Development game as developers try more and more outlandish names to make their creations stand out. Leave it to an old grandmaster like Sony to make back to basics fashionable again. As for the app in question, its simple and trimmed and the high quality you could expect from Sony. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6fUulEflgU&feature=player_embedded

Mobile Genres : Endless Running

Depending on a platforms capabilities there have always been certain genres associated with different platforms. The Nintendo Wii for example will always be associated with motion control games, normally of a childlike persuasion. Pc games will always be known predominantly for RTS and other mouse friendly games.
Touchscreen mobiles in the relatively short time they have been around have carved out a surprisingly large amount of genre niches. That is not to say that these types of games only exist on this platform but it would be hard to argue that touchscreens aren't the best suited for them.
This article is another one of our series articles in which Gametrender will discuss some of Smartphonings favourite genres. The one that is up on the podium this week is 'Endless Running'
A very reviewer friendly genre as it does exactly what it says. The character normally runs from left to right with inputs from the player normally limited to single finger jabs usually associated with an action like jumping. Scores are normally totted up by how far the character runs and the challenge is tempted up by adding obstacles along the way.
So far so simple, so you'll be asking what's good about it and why should you play it. I've chosen a brilliant endless runner called DIVERSION  https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ezone.Diversion&hl=en   as an example to show exactly how good a polished version of this genre can be.
Diversion is by far the best endless runner I've played. At first appearances it's apparent how much effort has gone into the game. The graphics are superbly rendered in 3d being easily on par with a mid generation Playstation One game. The music is all jingly and bouncy filled with adrenalin and hinting at the potential for manic kinetic energy.
The avatar you play with has a lot of personality. A female protagonist has been chosen perhaps in a cursory head nod to the legendary Mirrors Edge. The avatar its imbued with personality , and adding to the games sense of polish and fun is upgradeable. With lots of different outfits waiting to be bought or unlocked. Not only that but part of the fun is that each outfit bestows different skills which it is up to the player to find out.
On to the game itself, firstly it must be pointed out that it has lots and lots of levels, hence a lot of longevity.
Of course it wouldn't be up to much good if the levels lacked variety, but variety they do have in bucketloads-floating minse,slides,jumps,warps,ziplines to name a few. Timing is crucial on each of these as you attempt to get the highest score.

Diversion-Superb Endless Runner

And just when you thought that they couldn't possibly lavish any more love on this game then up they come with... Boss Battles! Very Impressive stuff and certainly a great poster child for app gamings beloved Endless Runner genre. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMO8g_52O2w&feature=player_embedded 
android games


If you like this then read our follow up post

Android Games on holiday

Mobilephones have in recent times joined the staples of a man's pocket, adding to the dynamic duo of keys and wallet most people wouldn't consider leaving the door without their mobile phones also.

These miniature computers,thanks to app access now have virtually unlimited uses: communication device,gps,alarm,camera,watch being among some of the most basic functions that we can enjoy. However there are some hard engineering facts that stop us using them to their full potential: they're just too damned easy to break!

Engineers have done a superb job in recent use in making mobile components faster,cheaper,more reliable and ever more powerful, however there is a pressing need to make them much stronger. Recently on holiday I was spending a lot of time poolside and down the beach. I'd unconveniently forgotten my camera at home, but whereas my mobile normally quite easily fills that gap I was reluctant to expose it to the sand and heat of the beach. Swimming laps in the pool I thought to myself that my experience would be enhanced if I was able to time my laps using the phone or listen to music. With its built in accelorometer it would have also been great to have an app that could analyse my swimming stroke and give me advice. That app sadly will not be invented for the forseeable future as phones are not pool friendly. Even sat relaxing around poolside I was reduced to reading a Kindle as in direct sunlight my xPeria Play's screen was just too hard to see.

Again on a bicycle tour down the Majorcan coast I was reluctant to bring the phone for fear of knocking it, on another note functions such as Google Goggles and Google Maps would have made the bike trip more enjoyable, but international internet access rates are far too steep to to be using the bandwidth for such activities.

Motorola Defy:A step in the right direction

So engineers you've created for us in the form of these great Modern Android Phones and other smartphones a new exciting generation of device, but it's akin to having a Ferrari supercar and only being able to drive it on sunny days on flat roads. There is a lot of potential being left untapped.<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/android" rel="tag"><img style="border:0;vertical-align:middle;margin-left:.4em" src="http://scm-l3.technorati.com/static/img/pub/icon-utag-16x13.png?tag=android" alt=" " />android</a>

From humble beginnings: Traditional gaming inspiring app gaming

Android gaming and smartphone gaming is arguably one of the most cutting edge fields in entertainment today, a developer has the ability to virtually create a game within a few hours, the tools and technology that developers and gamers have access evolve at a phenomenal rate. And more importantly unlike traditional gaming industries the Android market has a massive amount of freeware resource tools to draw on. But there is one issue that no amount of cutting edge tools can solve: that of creativity. The ideas of game designers must come from somewhere, recent games I've played give a very strong case for traditional non technological games being a very good source of inspiration.
  Pocket  Soccer by Rastergrid Entertainment http://rastergrid.com/blog/ especially got me thinking about this issue. The game it must be said is very good, with a slick presentation, three difficulty levels, lots of playability and polish. Of note was the way the game was played, on a simple playing field players take it in turn to push one of the players represented by a disc with the teams flag on it, to score goals. The influences are two fold with traditional football being a clear influence, flick football being another and interestingly enough the Rts staple of turn based games. Arguably without the developer drawing on these influences, whether consciously or not, the game of  Pocket Soccer would not exist.

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Crazy app downloads:Why did I do that?

Have you every looked on another persons phone? Not their messages or voicemail but actually what apps they have downloaded? It can be a very illuminating and sometimes downright scary experience. At a barbecue this past weekend it was getting to that time of night when most if not all conversations were exhausted and people were starting to deploy their smartphones enmasse. Another observation of the smartphone generation is that in one way they are very similar to baby boomers of a previous generation. It's never uncommon at parties of a certain age group for those with babies to trot them out and expect coos and aahs and suchlike from their captive audience. Well the smart phones who are infant less have found a way to retaliate! They bring out their phones, only of course if they are new and shiny enough not to be an embarrassment (the equivalent of a baby with a scary looking rash?) and like the other unlucky bloke across the room being regaled with baby stories the smartphoner feels obliged to show you what apps are on their phones. Well at this particular barbecue thankfully all the infants had been put to sleep leaving me at the mercy of a smartphoner. That is why at one in the morning I found myself being bored to death by a man smashing virtual bottles and being equally mystified as to why a thirty something year old would be deriving so much satisfaction from a talking, farting, drinking dog that you can beat up! On a positive note I was shown Sniper which is now on my to download list. It also made me realise how good the Gametrender concept actually is. Log onto gametrender.webs.com and you too could be having your own particular irritating app, drunk or sober, to bite or entertain with as you please. android games