Photography apps are a dime a dozen, and it’s pretty rare that a new photo app does anything more revolutionary than add extra filters. However, Dblcam is worth sitting up and taking notice of. This new photo app is fun, artistic, and makes a clever use of both cameras on your iPhone.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

Dblcam lets users snap a photo using both cameras on your iPhone. Both cameras can go off within a second of each other, thus capturing the person taking the picture, as well as the people and environments around that person in that precise moment in time. In other words, Dblcam creates a photo using the front and back cameras on your phone at the same time.

Pros

• Combines the front and rear images into a single image almost instantly
• App has a link to a service for making prints of your Dblcam shots
• Great for both self portraits and taking pictures of people/places

Cons

• Takes a surprisingly long time to load past the splash screen and into the actual camera utility
• There is a slight delay between the rear camera and the front camera going off: a tighter time period between the two flashes would make the images feel even more like they had captured a singular moment
• No way to delete photos en masse, you have to delete them one at a time from a popup menu

Discussion

When I first read about Dblcam, I had this idea that the images from the two cameras would be taken at exactly the same time. That’s not quite the case: there is a brief delay between the two. But from what I’ve read about the development process, the very short lag time between the rear and front-facing cameras has been coded in such a way that it is as close to simultaneous as it is possible for them to be.

Fast Company has a great piece about Dblcam, with a comment from Dblcam founder Benjamin Lotan. In the piece, Lotan really puts it best when he describes the images taken with Dbl cam as “subtle selfies.” The images are less narcisstic than a regular selfie, simply by virtue of including the world around you, from an angle you might not have expected. “You’re kind of in it only as a by-product of the image you’re trying to capture,” Lotan said.

There is a real art house quality to the images that you can capture with Dblcam. They are disjointed, but structured, immersive, but also stark in a way. There are few photo apps out there that are as rewarding when you experiment with them.

One thing I really dislike is how hard it is to delete photos. You have to launch a popup menu to delete items: why can’t I just press and hold on an image, and then have a little red “x” pop up in the corner. The functionality is great in this app, but I think the menus could be made more user-friendly.

Conclusion and download link

If you’re tired of other photo apps, Dblcam makes it easy to take photographs that are effortless, unpretentious, unique, and appealingly disjointed. Dblcam is just plain cool, and any photography fan should try it out.

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 1.0

Requires iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, iOS version 5.1 or later

Download size: 2.8 MB

Dblcam on Apple App Store