I don’t openly shill for any kind of product. Never have, never will.

On the other hand I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t share two iPhone camera apps that dramatically improve your iPhone photo quality, (especially when you want to upload photos directly to a blog or Flickr account.)

Both of these apps would have been useful in India, where my girlfriend brought her iPhone while I brought my big ole’ Canon 5D.

CameraBag

CameraBag is a fairly inexpensive iPhone app that allows you to apply custom filters over your iPhone photos. You can either do this at the time of capture, or afterward by picking photos from your photo roll.

There are a limited number of filters available, each of which mimic a unique film style. The only filter that really sucks is the Infrared filter which is completely useless. That being said, the other filters, most notably the Helga filter (which supposedly mimics a Holga) is really nice.

Kirk + Robin. Seattle, WA. 2008.

You can save and reopen photos, adding additional filters each time to tweak your photo even more. All in all an idiot-proof way to tone photos without a computer.

’1962′ Black and White Filter.

’1974′ Vintage Film Filter.

Normally I would NEVER tone a photo in my iPhone, preferring the robust options available in Lightroom or Photoshop.

CameraBag is the first iPhone app to make me reconsider this rule.

Pano

Pano is an iPhone app that allows you to create very wide and very detailed panoramic photos with your iPhone.

Pano is easy to use and works very very well.

Just take a photo, and Pano will provide a semi-transparent guide from that photo that you align with the next photo and so on. Once you have shot up to six photos, Pano will adjust exposure for each photo and stitch the multiple images into one giant panoramic photo.

It is really incredible how well Pano does this considering the relatively small amount of processing power and RAM available on the iPhone.

Pano works much better than some of my manual attempts at stitching photos together on a much more powerful MacPro Tower using Photoshop.

If you shoot each photo using horizontal shots, you get an insanely wide final panoramic like this:

If you shoot each photo using vertical shots, you get a much higher resolution panoramic like this:

I’m hoping that savvy app developers will continue to expand the creative possibilities of the iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera.

(Tomorrow I am going to print an 11x14in from the above photo. I will report back on how that looks, but I will assume that it will look pretty damn good considering the camera.)

-Kirk