This post is about my favourite iPhone camera app, not about the 2015 Bond film with one of the greatest tracking shot in cinema.
Spectre, by Lux, is from the same bunch of people who make the highly regarded iPhone camera app – Halide.
Halide has always got a lot of love from the developers whereas Spectre was the one that was often forgotten. I used Halide a lot back in the day when it was easily the best way to capture raw images on an iPhone. But lately the native iPhone camera app has inbuilt Raw abilities, yes, Halide gives you much more control and I do still use it, but the native iPhone camera is often the one I go for mostly because its much faster to get to it from the lock screen. If Apple ever let us change the default camera app, we’d be having a different conversation.
Whist I don’t use Halide as much as I did although the app has grew in features in the past few years, Spectre is an app that I always use and I still do. I thought the developers had given up on this app, the iPhone 13 Pro had 3 lenses : the 0.5x ultra-wide, the 1x wide and the 3x telephoto. But the app got so outdated on Spectre you would see options for 0.5x, 1x and 2.5x from the days of the 12 Pro Max – meaning the developers did not even update it to the new lenses on the 13 Pro Max, or the 14 Pro Max for that matter. I do not like using apps which don’t get updates, and such apps do not live on the first home screen page on my iPhone, Spectre, however was an exception.
Spectre would let you take long exposures, help you create light trials, and by the magic of long exposure lets you get rid of (moving) people in photos. My favourite of all these is the third one, I do not like people in my photos and I use Spectre a lot. I know there is a trick of taking a live photo on the native camera app and setting the live option to ‘long exposure’ gets this done but I always found that to be a gimmick, it rarely worked. The stabilisation from the Spectre app was miles ahead of any app, second only to having a dedicated tripod.
The new app update was long overdue and I am glad it’s here. As someone who had already paid for Spectre, I get this app update for free with 15 and 30 seconds exposures. If you hadn’t paid for this app in the past, now its just free to download and shoot 3 second exposures. But if you want to get up to 30 seconds of long exposures it just costs a one time unlock fee of £4.99, that it. As it says on the upgrade screen in the app, no subscriptions, no nonsense.
I’ll leave you with some of my favourite photos shot with Spectre below and this was when the app wasn’t getting much love and when the maximum exposure was limited to 9 seconds, I can’t wait to try this app out even more with the added 30 second limit. If you’d like to see them i’ll be posting them on my Instagram.
And if you haven’t got it already, Spectre is a free download from the app store here.
