Tuesday I finally saw someone in the local Walmart worthy of PeopleOfWalmart.com. This woman was wearing a long black evening gown (at ten o’clock in the morning) that had spaghetti straps that meet in the center back of the dress with standard bra and slip straps showing. So of course I took a picture but it turned out to be way too blurry. Darn.

My smartphone’s camera does about as well as I expected for a phone camera, which is not all that great but it takes okay pictures for a phone if you’re very careful and hold it as still as possible. The thing I really really hate about it is that I usually can’t exit the camera function and have to turn the phone completely off to get out of it.

I am not the geekiest person in the world but I feel that I’m reasonably comfortable with high-tech gadgets. I use them with no trouble, but sometimes it’s a little hard for me to wrap my brain around all the stuff smartphones can do. It wasn’t until Tuesday while I was in the middle of Walmart trying to exit the camera and get back to my shopping list that it suddenly occurred to me that IT’S JUST AN APP! And there are probably a gazillion camera apps out there.

Later at home I started looking at camera apps and it seemed like most of them have more bells and whistles than I really want. All I want is to be able to take a quick picture once in a while and then exit the camera without any fuss. So I went to the computer and Googled “best smartphone camera apps” and after reading a couple of lists found one called Little Photo.

Little Photo is fast and simple but it does have a couple of small problems. On its opening screen you see a picture of a camera and it tells you press to start. When you do it immediately takes a picture without giving you a chance to see what’s going to be in the picture. But that’s okay I guess because it doesn’t automatically save photos so you don’t have to go to the trouble of deleting the lousy photo you didn’t want in the first place. (More about that in a minute.)

To actually take a picture you touch the phone’s back button and it shows you two buttons “Exit to Camera” and “Cancel”. So you Exit to Camera and then you can take pictures. After you take a picture you can tap the center of the picture and it gives you a number of special effect options. To save the picture you touch the phone’s menu button and select Save. As I said above it does not automatically save photos and if you exit the camera without saving the picture it is lost, and there’s no prompt to Save the photo or “Are you sure?” so you have to remember to save it. Also, you cannot come back later and use any of the special effects on a photo you’ve already saved.

In spite of these flaws it’s really not a bad app. It’s fast and easy and takes pretty good pictures. This is the first one I took. I added the White Shine effect. (The original was much darker) After I uploaded it to the computer I cropped it to get rid of most of the TV which took up a good bit of the picture.