Spectre Camera
Take your iPhone photos to the next level
$2.99 From Chroma Noir, chromanoir.com Made for iPhone Needs iOS 11 or later (iOS 12 for some features)
Of the iPhone’s numerous indisputable talents, slow– shutter photography is not one of them. In the quest to make its own–brand camera app easy to use, the iPhone’s camera hides most of the technical niceties of photography from its user. That’s great for the mass market, less so for photographers who want to push what’s possible without splashing out more money on a real camera.
So it’s good to see apps such as Slow Shutter Cam, and now Spectre Camera offering photographers the tools to take their photography further. Spectre is affordable at only $2.99, but the app only really does one thing: allow you to set long exposure times in order to create either images with light trails or images which appear to have no people or traffic in them.
It achieves this with some technical black magic. Rather than just running your iPhone’s camera for a long time — between three and nine seconds — what it really does is shoot hundreds of exposures for your chosen exposure time, then blends them together, either recording light as it moves through the frame, or averaging the images together
spectre is lightweight, easy to use, and highly affordable
to give the impression of an empty space. Think a deserted Times Square, or a freeway with no cars on it.
Spectre is very easy to use. Simply compose your frame, press the shutter, and let it go to work. You can cycle through shutter speeds at the bottom right of the screen, and choose between recording light trails or averaging your images to make moving objects vanish. Otherwise, shooting options are thin on the ground — this app really only does one thing.
It does it well, though. Our test images — shot on an iPhone SE — were never going to trouble the output of a DSLR, but the app works well, and we like the on–screen stabilizer, which uses your device’s accelerometer to let you know when the camera isn’t shaking too much. Our test images, whether they were of light trails or simply long exposures, were adequately (rather than extremely) sharp — good enough for online sharing or small–scale printing. It also records live photos of light trails streaming through the frame — these can be particularly eye–catching.
One of Spectre’s more eye– popping claims is that it can be used to shoot long exposures handheld. We didn’t find this — handheld shooting resulted in very blurry images, even with the on–screen stability indicator suggesting a firm grip. Popping our test handset on a tripod fixed all that, and we’d argue that being able to shoot light trails from, say, a Gorillapod on an iPhone is impressive enough without trying to do it unstabilized.
Spectre is a great example of an app that helps to make your iPhone camera even more capable — it’s lightweight, very easy to use, and highly affordable. It doesn’t do much, but it does it very well, and anyone looking to elevate their late–night photographs would do well to get it.
the bottom line. A fun, easy–to–use, and effective app. DAVE ST EVENSON