Funny Photographer

The more recent iMacs, MacBooks & MacBook Pros all come with a built-in iSight webcam. They also come with a program called PhotoBooth which takes snapshots with iSight with different effects, and many people find this one of the coolest things on the new Macs.

I have an older iMac, and had to buy my own iSight camera. Unfortunately, it didn't come with any image capture software. PhotoBooth is shareware. I was getting rather envious of the new Mac owners, started searching for a free program that would do a similar job, and found one. It's called Funny Photographer. It captures snapshots for you using iSight, and it comes with different effects.



Turn on your iSight, open Funny Photographer, and you'll see the image on the program window. Select an effect from the drop-down list, and you get a preview of the image. If you're happy with what you see, just click the "camera" button, and the image will be captured for you. You can also opt for a lag of 3 seconds between the click of the camera button and the taking of the snapshot. After the capture, a thumbnail of the picture appears at the bottom of the window. You can save it, delete it, or if you prefer, just leave it there for the time being.

Of course you can take just a "normal shot", which is called the "simple effect". Some of these effects - as with a lot of them - are there just for the sake of it, but Funny Photographer does have a few which are pretty cool. My favourites are Cube, Reflection and Replicate. With the latter two, you can even drag the preview image around and create a different perspective or effect.
































Try it out for yourself. Download it from Fabian Spillner's blog, the program creator's site, or at the Apple Download Centre. It may not blow away PhotoBooth, but hey, for owners of the older Macs, it's still a very handy tool.