There are two stereotypical gear snobs whom I cannot suffer listening to: photo snobs and audiophiles.  Therefore, I absolutely love when snobby low-tech trends get blown up and turned into cheap gimmicks that any 12 year-old can reproduce on a high tech device.

One of these trends from a few years ago was the plastic lens Holga camera. It creates these spacy, blurry and quite aesthetically pleasing photos. Just check out the Toy Camera Pool on Flickr to see what i’m talking about. However, one hipster’s brilliant artistic discovery eventually turned into a product available at every Urban Outfitters shop, and now that has been quite faithfully reproduced on a very tasteful camera app for Android called FXCamera (by YMST)

Without even getting into FXCamera’s smooth interface and highly customizable nature, let’s just have a look at what it does by default:

FXCamera's "Toy Camera" setting.

Looks pretty 1970′s doesn’t it?  You can just imagine what it would do with wood paneling or an orange shag carpet in the picture.

FXCamera's "PolaNDroid" setting

Again…more 70′s.  It’s the perfect filter if you’re growing an ironic moustache.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the patience to grow one or else I’d prove it.  I gave it an honest shot for about two weeks and I realized that it would not be ironic when it came in.  It would be the medal of perseverance for enduring weeks of people telling me to shave and girls not talking to me.  There should be a club for dudes with red or blonde hair and moustaches.  We could have meetings where we sit around looking creepy.

"Fisheye" setting in FXCamera

This is a photograph of handbags. But ideally, this would be used to shoot a photo of a skateboarder so he could say, “Holy shit, did I really ollie that high?” and you could sigh and tell him yes and that he should probably send it to Thrasher’s Photograffiti.  My friend Josh snapped a picture with a disposable camera that got in there one time, so hey…you never know.   Keep shooting for the stars, kids.

FXCamera's "Andy Warholizer"

Here’s one that really serves no purpose.  They throw this filter onto practically every Webcam’s software, and I’ve never heard anyone go “Look at this fantastic picture of my dog rolling in shit in the style of Andy Warhol!”   Well.  I tell a lie…because that’s what this picture is.

Over the weekend, the devs added “normal” mode, which lets you pick your filter (normal, mono, sepia, negative, posterize, solarize), all the run-of-the-mill filters on your desktop photo editing freeware.  It is cool to have on your phone, though.

"Normal" mode

I think this is “Solarize.”  I never bothered to learn the difference between that and “Posterize,” because they’re both only useful if I want to look like I dropped my camera in an oil slick.

BOTTOM LINE: This is a super smooth app.  It did not crash, the interface is attractive and it’s highly customizable.  Though I don’t know how often I’ll use any of these, it’s good to know I have the option to switch to super blown out color camera mode just in case I need to snap a picture of me and Ian Svenonius or Cedric Bixler-Zavala when I run into them at the used book store.

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