Even the best and most accomplished photographers will sometimes miss the perfect shot or fail to capture the precise moment of action.
[do action=”boxout”]Download BLINK
- Press the Search button on your Nokia Lumia and then tap Vision
- Scan the QR code
- Tap on the link when it appears on the screen
- Install the application from the Windows Phone Store
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This is why the clever people at Microsoft Research have developed an app called BLINK (free) for Nokia Lumia smartphones that helps minimise the risk of this ever happening to you.
The idea is simple: the BLINK takes a burst of photos BEFORE you take the photograph and then another burst again AFTER you’ve taken the photo. You can then choose the image that has provided the best shot.
If you’ve ever tried to take a photo of someone jumping, then you’ll know that capturing the perfect mid-air leap can be fairly elusive. BLINK is for you!
Using BLINK
BLINK has another neat other tricks up its sleeve, with the animations, but the first feature to grapple with is picking the best still image.
Before you take the photo, there are camera settings for you to experiment with, such as scene mode, exposure, white balance and ISO. You can also use the flash and switch to the front facing camera.
Using the app is as simple as taking a normal photo with your Lumia camera – either tap on the screen or press the camera hardware button.
As soon as you take a photo, you’ll notice a white strobing effect on your screen for a few seconds. It’s just as if the app is… blinking.
More importantly, when it has finished, a timeline of each individual image that BLINK has captured is displayed on the screen. This is where you can select the best shot and save it to your camera roll or share it with your friends and social networks.
What’s really useful is that you can re-open saved photos from your camera roll and edit them again in BLINK, with the original sequence of images to choose from.
Animations
BLINK’s other killer feature is that you can save your sequence of images as a short animation.
Although, the end effect can look similar to our very own Cinemagraph app, they are fundamentally fairly different.
In Cinemagraph you can isolate a specific section or element of an image to bring it to life. Of course, you can also add a range of filters and effects as well.
With BLINK’s animations, you are just selecting a start and an end point from the timeline of the sequence you shot. All the photos within your selected range are stitched together to create the animation.
The animations can also be shared with friends and even uploaded to the BLINK social network. If you’re not a member already, you can join from within the app using your Microsoft account.
Blink is compatible with all Nokia Lumia smartphones running on Windows Phone 8.