I regularly keep 100+ apps loaded on my iPhone and one of my favorites is ToyCamera which I almost use more often than my iPhone’s regular camera… granted, I have an iPhone 3G (not S) so I’m not giving up any fancy new features like autofocus, but even if I had a 3GS I’d probably still use it all the time! That’s how frakkin cool it is… it makes lame photos a little less lame, and cool photos that much cooler. LOMO Camera is a lot like ToyCamera in that it imitates the visual effect of an old-timey piece of crap shutterbox, specifically the Lomo LC-A . The Lomo isn’t actually all that old or crappy – it was first introduced in 1984 and sports some cool features – but this Russian-made camera has made a pretty big name for itself among photography nuts and avant-garde weirdos, and now Westarting Studio has their own iPhone-ified version available in the App Store

I regularly keep 100+ apps loaded on my iPhone and one of my favorites is ToyCamera which I almost use more often than my iPhone’s regular camera… granted, I have an iPhone 3G (not S) so I’m not giving up any fancy new features like autofocus, but even if I had a 3GS I’d probably still use it all the time! That’s how frakkin cool it is… it makes lame photos a little less lame, and cool photos that much cooler.

LOMO Camera is a lot like ToyCamera in that it imitates the visual effect of an old-timey piece of crap shutterbox, specifically the Lomo LC-A. The Lomo isn’t actually all that old or crappy – it was first introduced in 1984 and sports some cool features – but this Russian-made camera has made a pretty big name for itself among photography nuts and avant-garde weirdos, and now Westarting Studio has their own iPhone-ified version available in the App Store.

I have to admit that I’ve never actually used a real Lomo camera, but I really like what this app does to iPhone photos and I like how it’s done. The actual function of LOMO Camera is really simple… take a picture or choose an existing one, preview it under a few different effects, and save the new LOMO image to your camera roll. That’s all there is to it.

The only hiccup I ran into was when I was goofing with a pic of Scarlett Johansson and her excellent cleavage, but after running it through LOMO it didn’t look right! To be fair, the pic was a pretty big one that I found online (800?600, Scarlett’s boobs deserve no less) and I guess the image size somehow cause the app to add some weird lines which you can see in the photo gallery. iPhone-sized 2 MP photos, however, get crunched by the app just right. I’m guessing it’ll also work ok with 3 MP images produced by the 3GS but don’t quote me on that.

LOMO Camera is great and does exactly what it promises, but being a regular user of ToyCamera I totally find myself wishing that someone would combine the two apps! ToyCamera has a bigger variety of filters but it applies them to photos at random, and LOMO has only three filters (black & white, redscale, and “normal” Lomo LC-A) but unlike ToyCamera it lets you choose which one to apply after the photo’s been snapped! I super-love each of these apps individually, but I’d love it even more if someone could combine the two and free up a spot on my Home screen.

If you take a lot of photos with your iPhone and/or spend a lot of time crying over how bad they suck, pony up $3 for LOMO Camera and go have some fun with it. It may not replace your default camera app entirely, but I think there’s a good chance it’ll become one of your most-used apps in short order.

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LOMO Camera