Photo Shootout App promises to let users experience the challenges, glamour, fame, and fortune of being a pro photographer anytime, anywhere on their iPhone. It brings the fun side of point and shoot Sim game play in a very different environment: forget about seeking bandits hiding behind dark corners and say hello to bikini clad Super Models lounging on the beaches you and I wish we were at.
The Photo Shootout App is a totally unique pro photographer Sim game play (it’s actually the first of its kind) developed by an experienced Photographer for Photographers. Not only does it let you take pictures of models, but also offers what promises to be insightful and valuable skills for many novice shutterbugs.
Your role is one of an aspiring photographer, and it’s your job to shoot your way to the top.
The Apps creative implementation of a twist selector (dial Knob) found on many cameras as a tool to the games menu options and the shutter release as the confirmation button is quite impressive.
The game offers three different training sessions to get you acquainted with the different Aperture, ISO and shutter speed settings needed to shoot the perfect picture. Each session provides you with a slider bar to help manipulate the settings so that the actual needle is set to the correct digit for the required exposure, shutter speed, and ISO. You then take a picture to be scored and move to the next image, ten in each session. Once all set, you can then proceed to taking Pro assignments for tear sheets and earn virtual money, which could be used to purchase better equipment from the in game Camera Store.
There are two kinds of assignments, Bathing suits and Beauty shots, consisting of a mere 11 photo shoots collectively, but provides the experience of looking through a Pro Photographers camera shooting gorgeous models in pearly white close up shots. Your goal will be to have the correct setting pertaining to that assignments requirements in order to capture your subjects (models) at their most photogenic moments. With all that set, you can start being snap happy, but be warned, timing, and waiting for that perfect pose goes a long way to capturing that front magazine cover spot, for each shot, a star indication lets you know whether its a good one or not, the better the shots, the more stars and vice versa. There’s also a limitation to how many pictures the memory card can hold, and a timer in which the shootout lasts, so being snap happy might not be advisable after all.
Once all that is done, you’ll be presented with thumbnails of all the shots you’ve taken. You can choose which one of the shots you prefer for your portfolio as well as a summary of which magazines, publishers, products endorsement your agent sold the pictures to. The more photos you sell, the more money you earn to purchase better equipment. You can even re-shoot assignments to earn more money with your newly improved equipment.
Overall, the concept is great but very limited and repetitive, since you shoot the same assignments after your equipment upgrades, same models, same grins, same poses, same locations, etc. More options would have been a welcome approach to keep the hopes of living the dream of a Pro photographer alive (well, virtually, at least). I had fun playing this game, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly once I had upgraded past the first department of the Camera Store. The repetitive nature of the game really puts a dampener on my hopes of having different assignments and maybe ‘hotter ‘ models to shoot once the upgrades were made.
These are three things that let this App down apart from the aforementioned issues:
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Editing features after a photo shoot are not present as described.
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All images are thumbnails that limit the ability to choose a close-up view for your portfolio.
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The lack of multitasking support forced me to restart shoots from the beginning when I quit the app.
Overall, the App does fall a little short on some of its promises, since I didn’t learn much or find it particularly challenging (it’s just too repetitive).
On a more positive note, the app does promise the ability to ‘Buy ‘ shooting assignments in a future version, with assignments ranging from extreme skateboarding to portraits of wild animals.
If whats promised in future versions is anything to go by, it might just be worthwhile to grab it now as its currently on sale for £1.79/$2.99.
Paul Michaels of Man Mountain Inc, provided a promo code to Just Another iPhone Blog for the review of Photo Shootout. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: app review, Photography
