I arrive at the scene of a car into a house, two minutes later there is a picture waiting across town for the web editor. Before noon yesterday, all of my pictures were published from my camera phone.
Two news events back to back, little time to waste using laptops, cords and legacy cameras. The irony of this speedy turnaround is that the Blackberry Storm contains a very slow camera, and would normally be unsuitable by photojournalism's 8 frames per second world. The operator of a Graflex Speed Graphic in 1920 would have all the skills to anticipate the use of this camera.
The Blackberry Storm uses a 3.2 megapixel camera with mechanical auto focus and auto exposure that is integrated with a really powerful LED flash/video light. The next version Blackberry Storm is expected to ship with a 5 MP camera.
The maximum still image size is 2048 x 1536 (with options for 1024 and 640) Auto white balance, image stabilization and Geotagging of files are options. Video is 320 x 240 and 176 x 144 (standard for MMS messaging)
The automatic flash setting has a manual override. The video light is manually added to video shoots and can be left on by default with a big warning provided about eating your battery. The flash and video light will fill a small room with light and was used in the picture of the car above.
The camera can be actuated by an external button or through the touch screen. The video camera toggles via the camera or you can move a button to the home screen for quicker activation.
It is possible to zoom in before shooting, but this is a "pixel" zoom and will make the overall file of the finished picture smaller. Just fine for MMS and web work which uses a smaller size anyway, but something to consider when shooting for full file size. The zoom is actuated by swiping the screen back and forth. The camera will focus down to a few inches for crisp macros. I have used it to copy a topo map and layered it with a GPS program. Great crisp detail.
Stills: Saved as a .JPG, the stills are saved into a user defined directory with thumbnails in date order. Options to send via email, MMS, Facebook and other installed applications are linked through the camera interface and the thumbnail media directory.
Large photo files are automatically re sized for MMS leaving the original, while sending via Blackberry's integrated mail system leaves the files in their full size. Attachment limitations for files sent via Blackberry's mail system are limited to 3 megabytes. It would be impossible to shoot a still .JPG over 3 MB with this camera.
Video: Saved as a .3GP file, the 176 pixel sized video must be manually selected for MMS messaging and a video shot in the larger 320 format cannot be sent via MMS. It can be sent through the Blackberry email system if under 3 MB. Larger files can be transferred to another computer via the USB/power cable or by using an FTP application. I have transferred video files out of the phone up to 30 MB without any problems using FTP.
A particular quirk of the media directory system is that while there are thumbnails for stills, videos unless named at the time of creation, drop to the bottom of the directory in a large number string. A large number of videos can be hard to search though unless you come up with a naming system, like the date, that would drop them in chronological order.
When shooting MMS video, the camera knows the limits of Verizon's video messaging system and will keep shooting video past those limits creating a stream of smaller separate videos that can be sent via MMS (or edited) separately.
Pictures and videos can be sent in the background while using other applications. A transmission status arrow appears at the upper right of the screen. Things can get a little crazy if you try layer shooting and transmitting videos at the same time, particularly the larger 240 size. Multitasking while shooting stills works great. It's a good idea to make sure that you aren't running several unnecessary applications in the background when jumping into a video experience, otherwise errors tend to occur while saving.
Aside from my dedicated mobile Facebook application, I also enjoy uploading videos via Facebook's automated MMS based mobile upload. An independent developer ÜberTwitter has created an application that links stills or video and your GPS location from the camera to an embedded link off your tweet.
An App in the Blackberry App World called scanR turns the camera into a copy machine that will create PDF files in camera that can be emailed and printed.
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