0:00 I think I found one of my favorite favorite photography apps right there you can just see it but before that I want to talk to you about what makes a good photo or film app on your phone before that a disclaimer I'm not getting paid to do this video I did however receive a one-year free subscription me and my friend gaggo to try out Lampa by the developer so I want to put that out there but here is why I like film and photo apps number one is if you like them actually number one is the Only Rule that we should worry about if you like them if it's going to help you take more pictures then use it who cares what anyone says and what anyone feels about it like when I first started photography there were film photographers who did a
0:46 really really great job no actually they didn't do it I chose to accept it and to believe it but they helped me believe that digital photography wasn't real and it wasn't a real art so I see people doing that right now to people that photograph on their phon and they mocked me and here's but here's something else that also happened I surpassed them and they stayed complaining and I stayed cashing those checks so there are many film apps on the market if you like them use them if they make you happy use them there are also many film apps on the market that I consider cheesy and cringe and to me film is something that is interwoven like it goes through the fibers of the photograph many apps and plugins I feel are just like a slap on top of the photo and it's it's awful if
1:33 you were to go and marinate meat for like a barbecue you want the flavors to go in through the meat and you want it to sit there for a while so it picks up the flavor at any level of that meat I've never heard anyone describe a barbecue like that like at any level of the meat but you know what I mean where if you didn't marinate the meat and you just no salt no pepper even and you just put it on the fire and then you SLA sauce on it it's just not going to taste as good like you want want it to be everywhere and I think that film is very similar in that way is that the grains and the the love and the color and the imperfections should be going through the photographs and some apps some plugins are just a slap on top of it but there's also things I don't like about film apps number one some people some
2:19 photographers will make that their primary style and that is not your style my friend that is the style of the developer and you're only using it as a crutch so I think that you should practice with film apps and photo apps but don't let it Define your style it's just a quick goto thing but we had a mission in this video number one let me just say my beautiful friend G who's also the editor of this channel he is a complete fraud and I'm going to call him out and GGO I'm paying you so you have to put this in the video I was honest and I photographed everything that came my way I told him the same thing I have text messages to prove this and I said photograph like a pigeon a Greek pigeon photograph a shoe photograph a shadow because that's what I did he comes back
3:06 with the most posed photos of him and his girlfriend who are the coolest people and and I vacationed with them two times in Rome and then in tum and P Del karmen and stuff like that in Mexico and I know that for every single photo that you see of him there are 43 other photos that didn't make the cut and they have their feelings hurt so I know how he sent these photos I give you real I I gave you Los Angeles raw and it's a very very raw City I went to the gym I went to go check out a new uh photography studio in the area I went on a walk I had a family dinner and he gave you his posed Greek vacation so I want to say that it's so funny that two people are such close friends and they work together and they're in two different
3:51 parts of the earth and at the same time they have like two different lives it's it's kind of cool like life is beautiful that way but also I thought well why not take advantage of that why not show the app like through La so I exclusively used the emoia filter and he exclusively GGO exclusively used the neutral filter Lampa comes with four of them as you can see on screen right now but we wanted to show you a variety of different lighting setups and locations through two filters that way you get to see the emoia filter and the neutral filter over and over and over and over but the four filters that Lampa does have is a MOA graphite neutral and then pix but I also want to tell you real fast as you're seeing these photos throughout this video is five things that I think
4:37 make a really good film or photo filter number one natural Vibes over plastic Vibes and you know how some photos they end up looking too shiny too perfect too Barbie too plastic Lampa does not do that and that was the first pleasant surprise that I had in fact I will even say that when you look at the outer edges of the photos they're softer they blend into each other more harmoniously and less of an HDR strong cut off line like HDR is really cool but that's not how I see that's not how I'm seeing the camera right now in this room Etc what they do is that they strip away that typical HDR look in the AI tweaks that can give you that AI look to me that has no humanity and if it looks super sharp it looks to me like chat GPT just stuck
5:23 its hand out and push the button on the camera then I'm not really that interested in it if you want to see the full images you could link to my substack down below and I'll post a whole bunch of them and you can see what they're like you can see them as a full size by the way the size is something we're going to talk about in a second the size of the photos that come out of this app the second thing that I like about film and photo apps the good ones is that and Lampa does a great job on it that's why I'm mentioning is it's Back to Basics but like with a Twist it's going to get a little techy but Lampa uses like the Slick capture engine that processes the raw data so it completely bypasses Apple's usual AI algorithms and that's the key part so what does that mean for us it means the magic of the photograph like when I'm just taking a photo is in the hands of the sensor in
6:13 the camera or the phone and the actual lens and I'm not worried about like some computer program that's like overzealous and just trying to spice it up and trying to make it super super crisp super HDR to me I think that's photography closest to his purist form the purist is actually using real film by the way I will share what I don't like about Lampa at the end of this video cuz I do want to be completely transparent and if I recommend you getting it or not but that's going to be right at the end another thing I'm going to give a little photo lesson on each tip is what Lampa is doing is they're just stripping everything down you're just getting a camera and you're getting four filters and that means any camera that you have is going to be good enough you're seeing all these cameras coming out especially in the third and fourth
6:59 quarter because they have to push the Christmas Market but as much as I love these camera brands you got to understand that in order for them to stay in business they have to Market on your insecurities and say well are you going to be good enough this year do you have this do you have that but we're seeing even through Lampa which is a perfect example that sometimes all you need is a pure Basics the basics use the basics of Premiere and da Vinci use the basics of Photoshop and Lightroom use the basics of your camera and I I think that that's what makes a photo more Timeless so when you see new camera ads coming out new lens ads coming out for this upcoming Market remember they need you to be insecure so that they keep selling more products massive price
7:46 hikes minimal adjustments in the technology so I'll probably never get a camera endorsement either now but the camera you have is plenty plenty good enough number three point shoot and just create Magic it's that simple and if that's your thing then I think you're going to really dig Lampa because despite Lampa handling raw data which sounds super complex it's actually easy to use so when you look at it it's literally there's no settings or there's one or two and that's it and there's no need to play with settings in fact I think that sometimes it creates a really bad photograph it becomes cheesy so Lampa doesn't allow you you to destroy an image by giving you a bunch of
8:32 settings an app like this that is easy is going to make you a better photographer if you're happy with the app you're going to end up using the app it is that simple number four it's less is more with color profiles instead of like overwhelming with like a zillion filters even Instagram has a ton of filters Lampa offers you four which at first I thought was kind of cheap but then I realized wait a minute it's smart to just give four and Lampa says themselves that they're crafted color profiles so with that being said Each one is developed with a colorless touch to make sure that your photos um they appear just the right amount of Contra uh contrast the right amount of color and just color Harmony in general the
9:18 perfect amount so I appreciate and I think that in most cases they perform sometimes not so much but that's all right and it's just about enhancing the scene naturally not painting remember when I said like you don't want to just slap a plugin over something a filter it's like ketchup on a steak you don't want to do that it's awful so this is just keeping it authentic anyways that's why you don't take it into another filter you never want to take something and then say you know what more more contrast more scurve more colors more more more and I think that that makes a photo look cheap don't overdo it if you think it's good go back 50% that's my general rule if I think it looks like
10:03 just Precision go back 50% and that's really the right spot Don't Spray too much cologne Don't Spray too much perfume don't filter too much don't put too much just everything in moderation and it'll stand the test of time now let's go to the fifth one before the fifth one you take beautiful photos you post them and people start sharing your photographs that's great if you know how to charge if you don't know how to charge where where do you even start at like where do you land on that scale and how do you even raise your prices by the way that's your starting point how do you raise your prices when do you know when you're too expensive or you're too cheap that's the only time your photography business is winning is if you understand pricing and the psychology of pricing and if you know how to price so believe
10:49 it or not I see this every single day in a DM or a comment or somebody's saying I how much should I charge for this and they end up just throwing out a number uh because they're stuck they're on the spot they don't want to lose the client and they're leaving so thousands of dollars on the table so I made a step pricing course my first online course of my step series and it's a complete GameChanger step stands for secret to easy photography pricing and so on and so forth and it has given many many photographers that peace of mind that confidence to charge exactly what they're worth and I want you to know to not only to take good pictures but also charge the right amount for them and step is linked down below all
11:34 right now let's go to number five which is future proofing photography I think the future proofing when I say that is um Lampa has a really slim down feature set but what I want to point about that is that future proofing your work sometimes means less as more and I just spoke about that just a minute ago when you do these super flashy things like a really really really heavy style in my opinion you can tell oh bell bottoms 70s oh cinching your pants at the bottom 80s baggy pants where you show your butt '90s 2000s I forgot what that was you can just sort of tell the eras and that could be good that could be bad that's up to you to decide so when you go super extreme on your settings and and really
12:21 process these images I I think that it can um kill your photos in your portfolio in the future and that's what I mean by Future proofing and I think that they've done a good job in making sure that they put us almost within a box almost within a leash to make sure that we don't stray off too far sometimes we need that I've seen some photos online I'm just going to say that now Lampa does say that they are going to Future proof themselves and add certain things like digital Zoom reprocessing options even tweaking exposure values personally I hope they don't do that personally I hope that they keep it really Slim there's so many apps that offer this and this and this and this and this and it's like I want something to be super basic I actually really like this in this iteration but
13:06 here's what I do hope but I didn't see it written in their white papers the file sizes you guys are like tiny tiny like they are so small I'd say so tiny that I hate the file sizes what if I took a photo that I thought was so beautiful and I want to maybe frame it like some of my work here it's not positioned for that I could run it through an AI app like a topaz or something like that but it that's not the same their files are really really small for me the emoia app everything was like 1.5 to 2 megabytes GGO was about 1 to 1.5 some were even in the kilobytes like 600 800 that sucks on a photographer level so I I hope that Lampa listens to that and they allow us
13:52 to have higher resolution photos I expect at least 8 mbes that's not a lot to ask for the other big enhancement that wish Lampa would do is that there has to be a timer uh built into this the amount of times that you see me doing a selfie in the mirror which normally I hate those but I wanted to show my day and where I was I wish that I could put just the camera down somewhere set a timer for 3 seconds give me three seconds that's all I want I hit the button I can hop Back 2 feet 5T take a picture and that is it those are the two things that I would ask Lampa to please improve if this video helped you please consider subscribing I do a lot of tips that help photographers in their business and help them develop and I make sure that I try
14:38 to empower photographers there's a lot of great channels so those of you that are watching this I highly highly suggest you keep watching but I also very much want to thank you for watching cuz you do have a lot of choices if you're interested in Lampa that's linked down below if you're interested in my step pricing course you can actually start making a full-time photography income that's also linked down right below my name is wed thank you so much if you have comments about anything put them in actually no can you put comments about how GGO did cheat because you clearly saw the photos of how I took pictures and how he took pictures thank you so much for the support and helping me trash my friend down below all right bye
