Photographer and developer Ben Syverson has created an iPhone camera app called Mattebox that mimics the Konica Hexar, a luxury point-and-shoot from 1993 that was powerful enough for professionals but simple and intuitive enough for beginners. It’s one of the most beautifully designed camera apps we’ve seen yet, and comes with a number of fancy features baked into it (e.g. dual stage shutter release, highlight recovery, advanced B&W conversion). The app costs $4 over in the iTunes App Store.

Mattebox (via TOP)

Smartphones are constantly getting better at imitating compact cameras, but so far we haven’t seen many cameras that attempt to mimic smartphones. That changes today with the Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera, a 16-megapixel compact camera unveiled at CES. It’s a point-and-shoot camera that’s pretty much a smartphone without the phone. Powered by Android, the camera features a 3x (36-108mmm) optical zoom lens, a 3.2-inch touchscreen, Wi-Fi connectivity, 720p video recording, and geotagging. The Android OS means that users can install and use Android Market apps on the camera (e.g. Instagram once it becomes available). It’ll be available starting in April for $300.

Want to travel the world through photographs? Wander is a new free app that can help you do that. It connects you with strangers around the world through photo-based conversation threads. Create a profile, and the app will suggest guides for you. Once you’ve established a connection with a “photo penpal”, you share lives for a week through photo-based missions, allowing you to glimpse into what life is like for a person. Once the week is over, you’re given a new guide to provide you with a whole new experience.

Wander (via Mashable)

It looks like Microsoft is finally putting its war chest and brilliant minds to good use: the company has released a new free app for Windows Phone users called Face Swap. The app uses face detection to let you quickly switch the faces of subjects in your photos. Simply shake the phone and faces will be swapped! The resulting face swap photos can be saved or shared on social networking websites. Hopefully they turn this into a web app soon.

Face Swap (via Engadget)

Instagram is holding onto its place as the darling of the mobile photo sharing world. After adding a whopping two million new users in a month thanks to Thanksgiving and the release of the iPhone 4S, the app now has a shiny new trophy for its shelf: it has been selected as Apple’s “iPhone App of the Year“. The future is looking extremely bright for the 13-month-old, 7-man company: Goldman Sachs recently designated it as a potential IPO candidate and founder Kevin Systrom expects the membership base to double once the Android version arrives.

(via TechCrunch)

If you enjoyed the beautiful 360-degree helicopter ride video we shared earlier today, then Condition One is an iPad app for you. It uses immersive video as a way to pull viewers into news stories — viewers control the camera by simply moving their iPad around!

The Condition ONE app gives users the ability to look in any direction while viewing footage. By pivoting and tilting the iPad, one literally manipulates the corresponding field of view. The highly sensitive motion controls produce the illusion of looking through a window into another reality, giving a visceral sense of ‘being there’.

Condition ONE will offer highly engaging storytelling with a focus on visual content conducive to being experienced firsthand.

It’s available as a free app through the iTunes store (with an Android version coming next year), so what are you waiting for?

Condition One (via NYT)

Thanks for the tip, Nelson!

HDR guru Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs has just released a new iPad app called Stuck On Earth that lets you travel the world through photographs. In addition to being a gorgeous way to view travel photos, the app serves as a high-tech travel guide, allowing users build and plan “trips” (collecting photos into groups).
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“Idea Mine” is an upcoming iOS app by Canon that helps photographers save and generate ideas. The idea is that photo ideas can always be broken down into four components: location, subject, feeling, and technique. Provide the app with these four things, and it will store your idea for you to come back to later on. If you need some inspiration, hitting the “randomize” button will fill in the fields for you — kinda like a photographic mad libs.
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Mirrorless cameras are designed to be compact, but how big are they compared to DSLRs? How big are popular DSLRs compared to one another? Camera Size is a website that helps answer these types of questions. It’s a simple web app that shows you exactly how big digital cameras are compared to one another and compared to reference objects (e.g. a battery).
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500px, quickly becoming known as the “Flickr for artsy photographers”, has released a new iPad app designed to deliver a beautiful photo viewing experience. In just a few days the app has already risen into the top 5 free photo apps in the app store, and now serves half of all traffic seen by 500px. GigaOM reports that users spend an average of 35 minutes per visit, viewing 80 photographs in the process.

The website has also been experiencing incredible growth. Traffic has grown over the past year by more than 20x to 3.4 million visitors per month, and continues to grow at 30% month over month. The service — which has 12 employees — currently stores 2.5 million photographs.

500px [iTunes App Store]