I always loved built-in camera app in my iPhone, mainly because it is as simple as point-and-shoot. Yes, it can’t process images and make them warmer or look like it was shot on toy camera (at least now), but when you need to capture great moment only thing you need is camera which, obviously, shoots pictures. I love street photography and I love shooting more than editing and constantly tweaking photos, especially on mobile phone. Story which photo tells you is much more important than how “correct” it looks in terms of color information, brightens, etc.

Streetmate is black and white street photography camera. What you shoot is what you get as a final image — exactly like on classic rangefinder film camera.

I love photography, both digital and film, and there is a big reason I still stick with film. Digital photography made actual shooting process less exciting and important, reason for it is huge memory cards and photo editing software that can do incredible things to photos. Today’s typical digital shooter will grab camera, shoot gazzilions of images, transfer them to Mac or PC, select favorite 10 and then edit them.

In early days Robert Capa would grab LEICA camera with 36 exposure film and think twice before shooting each photo. As a result he made some photographic masterpieces without editing and selecting favorites from three hundred photos. Think about it: masterpieces from 36 film roll without editing them even once. That’s because he was making photos while shooting them.

This bring us to Streetmate app. Before there was no iPhone camera app for just shooting great photos. No editing, no distraction from job and joy of photography. Streetmate allows you to set photo settings before you start shooting, think about it like loading a film roll: if load 36 exposure ISO 800 B/W film that what you’ll have during following 36 shots. That’s it, you select you sharpness, contrast and toning settings and start shooting. Photos will automatically developed and stored into your Streetmate gallery sorted by date taken in background while you are still capturing great and interesting moments. You can always goto gallery, view images, deletes bad ones, and share great ones via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and even Tumblr. That’s how simple it is to make great photos.

Currently Streetmate is Black and White only, because street photography in most cases is a black and white. I have no plans making it a color camera.

Color is too complex, too distracting for storytelling and documenting moment of life.

I personally love this app, I started to shoot much more street photos while developing this app. The whole point of this app is to make the photography part more pleasant.

Streetmate is available on the App Store for only $1.99

I have plans for iOS5 version which will make Streetmate more simple, faster and comfortable. More on this later.