While you’re usually best served by the camera app built into your smartphone, there’s a growing number of third-party apps that can offer a different, often even better experience. Released this week, VWFNDR + MBL is a new camera app that adapts to you as the photographer, putting out results free of excessive processing – and it’s Android-only to start.
VWFNDR is a company that has been building unique camera hardware which, as the company explains, aim to “bring back the fun and magic of photography” through “new hardware, UX, and interface design paradigms.” And there are certainly some very unique projects that have come out of this.
But, now, VWFNDR is releasing a new camera app on Android, “VWFNDR + MBL” – aka “Viewfinder Mobile” – which takes these concepts to your mobile phone. The idea here is to build a camera app that will adapt to you as the photographer, respecting your input and choices.
Manual controls are an inherent part of the UI, with shutter speed and ISO sliders front and center, as well as an exposure value setting. The app defaults to “Auto” mode, but you can cycle through typical manual camera modes such as shutter speed priority. You can also adjust the focus distance, or cycle through some camera presets for “Slow,” “Fast,” and “Flash.” The app defaults to capturing both JPG and DNG (RAW) files, and embeds “Content Credentials” with every shot. You can also fully reorder the manual control buttons to whatever layout you prefer.
