Fjorden Camera 4+

I’ve used a lot of camera apps and I eventually just make my way back to the stock app after a while. This app has had me coming back to it, it’s free and has some big time features that other apps make you pay for. The UI is good and everything seems well thought out.

Very close to being a 5 star app, just needs some smoothing out here and there.

This is a review of both the Fjorden App and the Fjorden grip system. So far the app is terrific. It is so deep that I’m struggling to figure out all its settings, but I’m really impressed so far with its integration with the grip. It gives one very immediate and fairly direct access to the panoply of settings. My complaints are primarily about the mag safe adapter. I just don’t understand what it is for. The magnet is simply not strong enough to ensure a reliable connection between the adapter and the grip and the phone. I’ve been very impressed by the mechanical connection between the grip and the phone case (although I worry that parts of that connection may become less solid over repeated use, particularly the hinge on the grip and the friction fit rubber dots that lock the grip into the bottom of the case). Luckily, the mag-safe adapter adds very little important functionality to the case for me. The cold sho may be important to others but it seems kind of flimsy and I would not trust the magnets to hold any additional weight. The one thing I really miss is that this mag-safe adapter is the only way to attach the phone to a tripod. No way I would trust MagSafe to securely hold my phone. This is the main reason I passed on the ShiftCam grip. In the end, I’m glad I did because despite the exorbitant price, the combination of the Fjorden grip and the Fjorden App is incredibly powerful and completely unique.

The device fits well and feels good with slight rubber grip feeling but the zoom feature seems broken, when i zoom using the zoome lever in auto mode the zoom sometimes wont stop, and then it gets stuck on the last lense and won’t pull back, so far it’s pretty unusable for me. Then there’s the issue with portrait mode only working with Face. On the native iPhone camera app, I can control the aperture and move it to 2.8f but on the Fjorden app it only applies what looks to be a intense “blur”’filter to everything around the image accept the face and it looks fake and I can’t control the intensity, it makes objects right next to the face blurry when it should be within perspective. Frustrating because I like the product but right now I can’t utilize it fully, it’s mainly a glorified camera grip with a shutter button because I don’t use manual mode becuase I can’t control the depth of field.