Lego Macro Photo

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I say you probably don’t know enough words to express yourself concisely, and you should improve your vocabulary.

Regardless, there’s some pretty neat apps on the iPhone, which can help transform your washed-out, badly-lit holiday snaps into works of hipster-art.

You’ll have to pay for some of them, but you really can’t put a price on making shit photos look great at the press of a touchscreen.

Here’s all the arrows you’ll ever need in your ironically blasé quiver:


Osmo 120

Osmo 120

Did you take a photo, and it didn’t look quite vintage enough? Slap in some light leaks and watch your picture go back in time, as if it were taken with some shite camera from the days of old.

Cost: £0.69


Instagram

Instagram

This is the sharpest blade in the hipster penknife. Tons of filters, borders, and blurs, to make any picture look vintagely delightful. A friend of mine proved this by taking a nice picture of Swansea (not shown).

Cost: FREE


Camera +

Camera Plus

High-powered app which has filters, and flexible editing capabilities. Up there with Instagram as one of the must-have’s.

Cost: FREE


Power Cam

Power Cam

New kid on the block, Power Cam, hopes to win the affections of both Instagram and Camera+ enthusiasts – by taking all the features of the aforementioned apps, and stuffing them into one uber-hipster mega-app. Oh and you can do all the same with video too – bonus!

Cost: FREE


Blender

Blender

Two photos are better than one. Blend together two images for double the fun, and twice the bohemian feel.

Cost: £1.49
iPad-friendly


Catpaint

Catpaint

The target market for this app is clearly Reddit users and middle-aged spinsters, but don’t let that put you off. When that image you just took is lacking something to make it ‘pop’, why not add a cat? With lasers.

Cost: £0.69
iPad-friendly


Halftone

Halftone

Give any situation that comic book feel – make your images look like they were printed in an 80’s comic book – how very retro. Additionally, you can add visual effects, so that picture you took of yourself punching a hooker in Shoreditch will have added emphasis. Kapow.

Cost: £0.69
iPad-friendly


Slow Shutter Cam

Slow Shutter

Stars are bloody awesome, I think we can all agree. But you’re not going to get a clear snap to show your friends without some sort of slow shutter app for the iPhone.. What’s that? There is one? Just make sure you hold it damn steady..

Cost: £1.49


Tilt Shift Generator

Tiltshift Generator

Nothing screams “awesome photo” like adding some well-placed blur effects, am I right? While Instagram lets you do this to a degree, Tilt Shift Generator has much more control over which parts of the image you want to drop focus.

Cost: £0.69


Pic Frame

Pic Frame

If you need to document a series of images, or add an assortment of different images into one ‘clusterfuck à la dilettante’, this is the app for you. So many combos, so little time.

Cost: £0.69
iPad-friendly


Incredibooth

Incredibooth

You know when you need a photobooth to take montages of drunken antics, but there’s not one in sight? Save yourself a nationwide ban from Boots, and download this little bundle of joy. Wind effects not included.

Cost: £0.69
iPad-friendly


Stachematic

Stachematic

If you need to accentuate your grandmother’s moustache, and don’t want to draw on her face with a permanent marker (no matter how tempting that may be), fear not – there is an alternative!

Cost: FREE


Lego Photo

Lego Photo

Great news everyone: Lego is cool again. Nothing says “I was an eighties kid” like converting an image into multicoloured plastic bricks.

Cost: FREE


Movember

Movember

Honourable mention to Movember here – if you’re not already participating in the charity moustache growing competition every November, download this app in advance of the next round. Keep track of your fundraising efforts, photograph your moustache growth, upload hairy pictures to the offender’s register, and revel in your ironic method of doing good.

Cost: FREE


Trollolol

Trollolol

Instantly meme-ify any picture by adding a trollface – the library of badly drawn facial expressions is immense, meaning there’s one for every situation.

Cost: FREE
iPad-friendly


Perfect Photo

Perfect Photo

When most of your pictures are taken in trendy underground Shoreditch bars, the chances are, you won’t be able to see jack shit. Perfect Photo is pretty much the phone equivalent of Photoshop, in terms of adjusting the levels and contrast of any image. What was once dark is now clear, and you’ll be able to spot all your checkered-shirt friends chugging mojitos in the background of your shots.

Cost: £0.69


360

360

The 360 app lets you create – you guessed it – 360 degree panoramic images, by stitching them together with some new-fangled accelerometer virtual reality technology. You can also generate a cone image to show of your trendy surroundings, as seen above.

Cost: £0.69
iPad-friendly


Type Drawing

Text Drawing

Annotations are extremely helpful when the subject of your image might not be clear. Dispel any confusion by letting the viewer know exactly what they’re looking at.

Cost: £1.49


Timelapse

Had to allow this in, as it is technically ‘photography’ – Timelapse let’s you take hundreds of pictures at a set interval, then put them together to make a movie. The resulting video makes people move around as-if on crack cocaine – in HD.

Cost: £1.49

But the fun doesn’t stop with just apps, oh no:

Olloclip

Olloclip

When all the apps above aren’t enough, add some hardware to take care of the pre-production. Olloclip is a fisheye, wide angle, and macro lens that pops right over the camera corner of the iPhone.

Cost: £45


Glif+

Glif Plus

Glif+ is a mount that bridges the gap between your iPhone and a tripod. Use in combination with the Gorillapod below – or any other tripod you happen to have lying around your converted warehouse.

Cost: £20


Gorillapod

Gorillapod

Gorillapod is a tripod which can attach to absolutely anything, to get pictures from all sorts of silly angles. Even to an animal for comedy effect.

Cost: £15


INK361 / Instagrid

INK 361

Instagram doesn’t have a web-based browsing tool, strangely. However, there’s a couple of good 3rd-party sites, which can display all your efforts into a handy grid layout, so you can reminisce over them while sipping an appletini.