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Today, most pictures are being taken with cell phones, with the regular camera left at home. In fact, on Flickr, the iPhone is the most used camera. Phone cameras are easy to use, they are quick, they are light and with Instagram, Hipstamatic and Super8 for video, you can take some pretty good shots. You just have to click and the camera does the rest, just like the Instamatic cameras of the 1970s. Yet there are often times when you want to take better pictures. Maybe its vacation shots, perhaps pictures of your child’s birthday or to memorialize that brand new puppy before he gets big and starts eating your shoes. So, for those occasions, many people have an SLR camera sitting somewhere in the house, packed away in a drawer or in the back of a closet. But when the big camera does come out, most people just put the SLR on automatic, making its quality just moderately better than a phone camera.
To really take advantage of an SLR, you need to use some of its functions such as aperture, shutter speed, depth of field or ISO. What the hell are these things? What do they do and how do they change my pictures for the better? Well there are more reasons than I can write about here, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. That is where CameraSim comes in. The web app is a virtual SLR based around the LCD screen. It lets you experiment with lighting, ISO, aperture, shutter, focal length, and distance and see results immediately. Simple sliders allow you to manipulate these settings and snap a photo giving you instant feedback of the result. For those afraid of manual photography, the exercise gives you a great opportunity to experiment with different combinations of settings without wasting equipment, film, or time.
Take a look, its free. And maybe you’ll learn something you can use the next time you take that camera out from under the stack of clothes, in the closet behind the vacuum cleaner.
NY Times Art & Design
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