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Should this be the next cool smartphone camera mode: tilt-shift for photos and videos

By Victor Hristov

Updated: Jan 22, 2016, 5:22 AM

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This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.

Should this be the next cool smartphone camera mode: tilt-shift for photos and videos

I was just looking through my old photos and came across some images I took a couple of years ago with my Olympus Pen camera that I owned for a short while before it got stolen. I have a thing for gadgets and photography: I get new camera gear more often than I should, and I usually play with it for a while, only to leave it gathering dust on some shelf. The images, though, do remain, carefully stacked in the comfort of the cloud, and the ones from the Olympus Pen caught my eye.

A non-pretentious mirrorless camera, the Olympus Pen (E-PL3 in my case) is not likely to go in the history books. In fact, some reviewers called it 'an almost great camera', which is not exactly flattering. But it did have one extremely cool feature: tilt-shift mode. And once I discovered it, I was hooked. The tilt-shift effect miniaturizes the world to make it look toyishly fantastical, and the effect is usually aided by boosted saturation and vivid colors. My photos with the effect turned all my friends and familiar landscapes into some fun and memorable avatars of themselves. And looking back through these photos, I wished I could capture such images with ease on a modern smartphone as well.

Tilt-shift makes images toyishly fantastical. Why don't we have it on phones?

So here's an idea for you, Apples and Samsungs of the world: give us tilt-shift mode in your phone cameras! Modern day phones certainly do have the processing power and there are many third-party apps that offer this function (check out the links below), but fact is that unless a camera mode is built inside the stock camera app, it gets very rarely used. Time lapse, slow motion videos and most recently, live photos, are all illustrations towards that: it is important for camera features to be built inside the stock camera app in order for people to use them.

Right below, you'd find a few images from my good old Olympus Pen and a video showing the tilt-shift effect. Do you like this effect? And would you like to see it in the stock camera app of your phone? Let us know in the comments!

*Currently, you can achieve the tilt-shift effect with apps like TiltShiftGen2 for iPhone and Tilt-Shift Camera for Android.

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Victor, a seasoned mobile technology expert, has spent over a decade at PhoneArena, exploring the depths of mobile photography and reviewing hundreds of smartphones across Android and iOS ecosystems. His passion for technology, coupled with his extensive knowledge of smartphone cameras and battery life, has positioned him as a leading voice in the mobile tech industry.