A couple of years back I wrote a post titled "4 Photography Apps I couldn't live without" revolving around the Samsung Galaxy S2 Android handset that I had at the time. Since seeing the error in my ways, and going back to Apple, I now have an iPhone 5 and felt I ought to share some of the key apps for photography that I use on a regular basis.

HDR Pro - £1.49

I love this app and I use it a lot. It offers far more flexibility than Apple's HDR offering and produces far better images, in my opinion. This HDR app works by taking a photograph exposed for the shadows (the dark bits of the scene) and an exposure for the highlights (the lighter areas) and merges them together to produce a more evenly balanced image. You can then go into the sliders to adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation etc and also add filters and frames within in the app itself. the See below for examples. 

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Pro Camera - £2.99 

There are so many features in this camera app that I just can't go into them all. The main one for me is that in Export mode, you can separate focus and metering - meaning that you can drag to a point on the screen that you want your focus point to be, and then drag a separate point over to a an area that you want to use to meter the scene. This provides much more control over the image you take. ​

Other features such as burst mode and a digital spirit level make this my go to camera of choice.​

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Camera! Awesome - £ Free

This app is up there in my regular go-to list primarily because if the filters, textures and presets it offers. I rarely share direct from any app (see below why) however the ability to tweak images in this make it a very nifty little program for adding some artistic styling.

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The Photographer's Ephemeris - £5.99

This has been a must have for planning dawn and dusk shooting for some time. You drag a pin onto the area you want to shoot and you can see what track the sun and moon will take over the course of the day and where they will rise and set. And that's just the basics.​

Resizer - £1.49 

As a result of the changes to copyright and all this orphan work's nonsense I now no longer share anything on the internet larger than 800px. Unfortunately the majority of the apps on the iPhone for sharing photographs just don't offer the ability to shrink down an image before you upload it. Using this lil' fella trimming down is a very simply task but an extra step nonetheless. It would be nice if there were a camera app that would incorporate this step and the next one.​

Marksta - £1.49

For the same reasons that I now use Resizer above, I use this. Once set up, I can add a copyright watermark to a resized image and it's ready to share. It takes a little messing around to get the text and style that you want, but once you've done it, using it again and again is as simple as it gets.​

So there you go. 6 iPhone photography apps that I couldn't live without. Have I missed any? Are there any that you use religiously? Feel free to share in the comments below.​

Tara for now.​

Neil