# Bulb: Film Exposure Log — Say the frame. Then walk on.

> Say the frame. Then walk on. (iPhone/iPad app by Nicolo Stortiglione Pudel.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/bulb-film-exposure-log/id6807141971 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Nicolo Stortiglione Pudel](https://appshunter.io/developer/6807141974)
- Category: Photo & Video, Utilities
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 17.0 · 11 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2026-09-08
- Data updated: 2026-10-20

## What is Bulb?

You shoot film and then, six weeks later, a folder of scans arrives with nothing in it. No aperture, no shutter speed, no date, no place. Just pixels.

Bulb is the notebook that fixes that. It is made for slow photography: medium format, large format, and any film shot deliberately enough to be worth a sentence a frame. You say each frame out loud as you shoot it, in ordinary words, and Bulb turns the sentence into readings and a note.

"f 5.6, two seconds, minus one, the bathing box before the mist lifted"

Tap the key and it settles once you stop talking. Hold it down and it listens for as long as your thumb is there. If there is nothing to say, tap SKIP and the frame still counts, so the numbers stay lined up with the lab.

WHILE YOU SHOOT

Pulls shutter, aperture and compensation out of the sentence and keeps the rest as the note.
Marks the words each reading came from, so a mishearing is obvious now rather than in six weeks.
Corrects reciprocity failure for the stock you loaded, while the shutter is still open.
Takes one location fix per frame.
Keeps a reference photograph per frame, cropped to the shape of the film. It stays on the phone and is never written into your scans.
Turns red on black after dark, so it does not cost you your night vision.
Draws 35mm, 120 and sheet film as what they actually are, not as rows in a table.
Carries the last frame's readings forward, plainly marked, so three sheets of one composition are logged with one tap of SAME.
Understands aperture priority. Say "f 8 on auto" and the scan is marked aperture priority rather than lying about a shutter speed you never knew.

ON 35MM, SHOT FAST

Say nothing at all. Skip through the roll, or tap SAME when the light has not changed, and the scans still come back tagged with camera, lens, stock, date and the place you stood.

THEN THE SCANS COME BACK

Wind the roll off and you get a proof sheet, cut into strips the way a lab prints one. Send the roll to the computer your scans are sitting on and open bulb.film/app in a browser.

It sets every scan beside the reference photograph you took of that frame, and puts the roll in order itself. You look down the rows. If one is out, an arrow moves it. Then one key writes aperture, shutter, ISO, compensation, date, camera, lens and position into the EXIF of every file, keeping each original beside it, untouched.

Lightroom reads it on import, the same as it would read a digital file, and puts the roll on a map.

ON PRIVACY

There is no account and no sign-in. Your rolls, frames, notes, locations and photographs stay on your phone. Speech becomes text on the device.

One optional setting, called a better ear, is off until you switch it on. With it on, a few seconds of audio for one frame go to Bulb's own server for a more accurate reading, and nothing is kept. Turn it off and Bulb goes back to hearing everything locally.

Free. No adverts, no subscription, nothing to buy.

Made in Cape Town, for people who still shoot film.

## Is Bulb safe?

Not enough ratings yet to assess Bulb.

## Is Bulb legit?

Bulb: Film Exposure Log has limited verification signals. The AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Bulb is 58 out of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.


## Version history (last 4 releases)

### 1.0.3 — 2026-09-17

A frame now keeps the whole sentence you said. The shutter speed and the aperture used to be taken out of it, which left the rest of the line reading oddly. They stay in, and the readings still sit on the line above.

The same sentence goes into the caption when you tag your scans on the desk, so what reaches Lightroom is what you actually said.

### 1.0.2 — 2026-09-10

Aperture and shutter speed on the logging screen.
You can now set both without leaving the frame you are logging. The same three dials the frame editor uses sit under the sentence. What you said lands in them as it is heard, and a dial you turn by hand wins over the words, so a frame can be logged without saying anything at all.

The shutter dial is in whole seconds.
Bulb is no longer a position on it. Saying "bulb, four minutes" now records four minutes rather than the word, so a hand timed exposure is a number you can correct to the second. The dial runs in whole seconds to five minutes and in whole minutes to an hour.

Hearing that actually works.
The larger speech model has never once run. The routine that closed the microphone wiped the recording before it could be handed over, so every frame ever logged got the phone's first guess and nothing else. That is fixed. When there is signal your sentence is read by a model that knows what an f-stop is, and the words come back right.

Nothing rewrites what you said.
An earlier version passed the sentence through a language model to tidy it, and that model removed ordinary words. It is gone. What you said is what the log keeps. Hesitation still comes off, um and uh and one leading so or okay, but by a plain tested rule rather than a model.

The end of your sentence is kept.
The recogniser was being shut down the instant your thumb came up, before it had delivered the last words it had already heard. It is now given a moment to finish.

Said once, recorded once.
When the recogniser restarted its guess mid sentence, the two halves were glued end to end and the sentence appeared twice, the first copy cut off. The seam is now examined rather than assumed.

The field while you talk.
Holding the key turns the field into the recording itself, your voice moving across it with the time you have been talking. Nothing appears while you speak. The sentence arrives once, whole, when you let go, with the readings already in the dials.

The words of the craft.
Both the recogniser and the model are primed with photographic vocabulary, including the zone system and zones one to ten, the processes, and the print terms.

Also: the say key now feels like a shutter release under the thumb, and there is no switch for the hearing any more. Where your voice goes is said plainly on your first roll and lives in the roll menu.

### 1.0.1 — 2026-09-08

When the scans come back, the phone now tells you exactly what to do: send the roll file to the computer the scans are on, open bulb.film/desk there, drop both. The desk address has a copy key, and copied on the phone it pastes on your Mac.

Notes no longer keep run-together label words or bare numbers left over from a misheard reading.

### 1.0 — 2026-09-08

No release notes.

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