There’s a touch of free­dom that makes the iPhone a great lo-fi camera.

A slew of apps have come even before the App Store opened for busi­ness, some notable num­bers pop­u­lar­ize the term iPhonog­ra­phy (this is how I pre­fer to spell them). One of them is Hipstamatic, it came late last year and is recently being fea­tured as iPhone App of the week.

If you don’t buy their pitch (they have a story about how it came to life), maybe you should con­sider mine instead:

It’s a per­fect $5 christ­mas gift for your­self, or your iPhone-using-paparazzo friend, yes occa­sional crash still hap­pens and opt­ing in high-res out­put gives you the never-ending wait to snap another around, but you’re in for a dif­fer­ent kind of iPhone-photography game, peo­ple… and this time you might want to stay a lit­tle longer cause dig­i­tal never felt & looked so finely analog.

4 months, a few dozen notable apps later, this one indeed stays, I still use it reg­u­larly, along with Art&Mobile’s TiltShift Generator, QuadCamera & ToyCamera, as well as the lesser-known AutoStitch (cur­rently on Sale) that does a mar­velous job stitch­ing those mul­ti­ple shots into one usable panorama.

As I pre­dicted, Best Camera never lived up to its hype, while CameraBag, the orig­i­nal app that inspired it is still stand­ing strong and intro­duced a desk­top & iPad ver­sion to com­plete your dig­i­tal cam­era bag.

And recently, there is Andigraf. Inspired by the artist that started the whole pop-art move­ment, this dig­i­tal Andy Warhol copies Hipstamatic’s proven suc­cess in mim­ic­k­ing a retro cam­era, improv­ing upon QuadCamera’s mul­ti­shot fea­ture with an inter­val con­trol and a bet­ter designed/positioned shut­ter release.

A few friends rec­om­mended SwankoLab; the orig­i­nal app & the pixel per­fect graph­ics comes from the mak­ers of Hipstamatic — I have yet to give it a try, but the thought of actu­ally play­ing dark­room on such a small screen doesn’t appeal to me, maybe the iPad will change my mind.

Last but not least, Mill Colour is a low pro­file app that gets the job done, it hasn’t been updated for a while, but its excel­lent col­or­ing con­trol came handy to give your final image a nice final touch before blast­ing a tweet.