If you’ve ever had a mentoring session with our Head of Mentoring, Anna, or met Anna, or had the chance to hear her speak at one of our Change the World events, you’d know she is a fountain of knowledge. Seriously- we don’t know if there is anything about social media she doesn’t know! In the weeks since Change the World, we’ve had a few people ask to share the apps that she uses for photography that she spoke about at the event. In the spirit of giving the people what they want…. we present to you:
Anna’s Essential 9 Apps for Photography!
Snapseed: Snapseed is a basic, free photo editing application that allows you to enhance your images with precision. According to Anna, it’s the one she uses 99% of the time. In it, you will see many of the same editing options as in expensive subscription-based applications like Photoshop or Lightroom. But… Snapseed comes without quite as much detail- and the hefty price tag! Win-win.
Snapseed is great for: quickly touching up a photo you’re about to post to your Instagram feed of your team outside your organisation headquarters.
Camera+ Legacy: Camera+ is the app Anna loves to use when actually taking photos on her iPhone. It allows you to shoot a photo using many of the settings you’d see in a traditional DLSR camera. You can adjust shutter speed, ISO and white balance, capture in RAW, take high-quality portraits, adjust shutter speed for long exposure shots, stabilizer for action shots and even enter macro mode to get extreme close ups.
Camera+ is great for: capturing an extreme close up of the new kitten that has just arrived at the shelter that you want to let people know will be up for adoption soon!
VSCO: VSCO is another mobile app that is great for making on-the-fly edits to both photos and videos. There are a variety of pre-sets you can choose from (you know we love presets!), in addition to adding in borders, vignettes and performing basic edits to improve the quality of your photos. They have recently added in video-editing capabilities as well with a paid-subscription model, but full-disclosure, we haven’t tried them yet!
VSCO is great for: selecting a free preset filter you can quickly apply to all of your photos before posting them to Instagram.
Afterlight: Always good to have a few photo editing apps in your back pocket, but truth to be told, Anna says she rarely uses anything but Snapseed anymore. If you love Adobe Lightroom, or that original Sin City-esque light saturation you may find Afterlight is for you. It allows you to merge together two photos for a double exposure effect and boost light around certain colours. But- 99% of the time, it’s still Snapseed.
Afterlight is great for: Amping up the light and drawing attention to those bright veggies you just harvested from the community garden.
Canva: WHERE. DO. WE. START. We love you Canva!!! Canva is good for everything you once thought you’d have to hire a graphic designer for. Need an Instagram tile? Go to Canva. A voucher to hand out at your fundraising auction? Canva. A we’re hiring post for Facebook? CANVA. Canva is just an amazing tool for creating really quick, well designed assets for your social channels. They have a whole bunch of already created templates where you can literally just drag and drop new text, photos and change the colour scheme. Definitely give it a try!
Canva is great for: everything. But seriously, that thank you post on Facebook, the call for volunteers, the event cover photo with all the details people need to quickly find. You name it… Canva has got you covered.
Wordswag: You know all those inspiring quotes you see all over Instagram? You know the ones like Foundr always has, that put a little jump in your step for about 10 minutes before you check your inbox and see you have 7,328 new emails from yesterday? This is where the magic happens.
Wordswag is great for: Sharing factual news on your Facebook and Instagram like how close you are to reaching your fundraising target.
Unfold: Unfold is a tool for storyboarding your posts. There are 25 free templates and 90 premium-paid templates you can use for a “scrapbook” like effect on posts. You can add stickers, change the colour of a photo’s borders, add text, change the font, move it around, rejig your layout, add another slide. You get the gist… it’s great for that sequential marketing collateral that breaks up a story into several slides in a slideshow or carousel-style post.
Unfold is great for: creating a carousel ad on Facebook that prompts viewers to slide between the tiles to continue reading your well-crafted story, with a clear Call to Action at the end- of course!
Hypetype: Hypetype is a way for you to add in words on top of your images. You can add captions to your videos, or moving animated text on top of photos you’re going to share. It’s free but will cost $3.99 per month to remove watermarking (which you will probably want for any sort of professional use).
Hypetype is great for you for: Adding an exciting announcement (like maybe hitting a fundraising goal!) to a static image of what you’ve bought for your organisation with that money- that you’re about to post on your Instagram feed.
Grids: Ever seen a photo that spans many tiles on an Instagram grid (like our one below) and wonder how they did it? Well, now you know and can do it too! Grids is a tool that allows you to take one static image and break it up into 1 of 6 configurations to better suit your Instagram aesthetic.
Grids is great for you for: splitting up a hero image you’d like to share on your feed for a big announcement like a new large sponsor you’ll be partnering with all year long.
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