Camera Red vs Starlapse

MODERN CONTROLS FOR OLDER SONY CAMERAS Many older Sony cameras are still excellent—but the apps available for them are often limited, outdated or no longer supported. Camera Red gives compatible cameras a modern companion app with live view, full remote control, advanced timelapse shooting, memory-card browsing and several ways to transfer photos to your iPhone. REMOTE SHOOTING FROM ANYWHERE Connect directly to your camera over its own Wi‑Fi and use your iPhone as a wireless viewfinder. See the live image, release the shutter, control focus and adjust shutter speed, aperture, ISO and white balance. Settings are placed on dials you can drag instead of tapping through values one at a time. Frame the picture, focus and take the shot without standing behind the camera. CREATE TIMELAPSES YOUR CAMERA CAN’T Add interval shooting to cameras that do not have it built in. Choose the interval and number of frames, and Camera Red shows the total shooting time and finished video length before you begin. While the timelapse is running, scrub through the captured frames to watch the light and scene change. When shooting is complete, the app assembles the video automatically. Every frame is kept, so you can rebuild the timelapse later at a different frame rate—or at a higher resolution after transferring the full-size originals. BROWSE THE MEMORY CARD Explore your camera’s memory card by date or folder, select the photos you want and transfer them to your iPhone. If the camera offers several transfer sizes, you choose which version to download. RECEIVE RAW AND JPEG FILES AS YOU SHOOT Camera Red supports several ways of working with your files. Use the camera’s “Send to Smartphone” function to browse and download photos, or configure its FTP function to send RAW and JPEG files directly to the app as they are captured. FTP transfer can also work with supported cameras from other manufacturers. Nothing is uploaded to the cloud. Your iPhone is the destination. REVIEW EVERY SHOT Camera Red includes a complete photo library and viewer: • Pinch to zoom • View a histogram with numerical values • Check the exposure settings recorded by the camera • Pick or reject photos to quickly narrow down a session • Play videos • Share or save your files wherever you choose TRY EVERYTHING FREE FOR SEVEN DAYS Every camera feature is available free for seven days. After that, one purchase unlocks the complete app permanently—no subscription and nothing to cancel. Photos already stored on your iPhone remain accessible whether or not you purchase the app. A built-in demo camera lets you explore the app before connecting a real camera. CAMERA COMPATIBILITY Remote shooting requires a Sony camera that supports Sony’s Camera Remote API and includes “Ctrl w/ Smartphone” in its network menu. This includes many models released from approximately 2014 to 2019, such as: • Sony α7 III and α7R III • Sony α9 • Sony α6000, α6300 and α6400 • Sony RX100 IV and later compatible models Memory-card browsing uses the camera’s “Send to Smartphone” function. Automatic file transfer requires a camera with FTP support. Available features may vary depending on the camera model, firmware and selected file format. Camera Red is an independent application and is not made by, endorsed by or affiliated with Sony Group Corporation.

Photograph the night sky properly, on a phone that was never meant to. Starlapse locks the camera and keeps it locked. ISO, shutter, focus, white balance — set them once and they stay there for the whole session. No creeping exposure, no autofocus hunting in the dark and landing on nothing, no auto white balance turning the sky orange under a streetlight. Then it does the thing the hardware cannot do alone. An iPhone sensor caps a single frame at about one second, so exposures longer than that are built by stacking hundreds of frames. That is not a workaround — it is better. Noise falls as the square root of the frame count, and the same night's light can be developed as pinpoint stars or as star trails afterwards, because nothing is thrown away. WHAT IT DOES • Manual camera that holds — ISO, frame exposure, focus, white balance, lens choice • Autofocus on starlight — steps the lens and measures star size, the way observatories focus • Self-timer, 3 or 10 seconds, so touching the phone does not shake the first frames • Stacking from 10 seconds to a full hour of collected light • Pinpoint stars — frames aligned on the stars themselves, so they stay points • Star trails — the sky's rotation drawn as arcs, ground kept sharp • Night time-lapse where every frame of the video is its own stack • Meteor detector — watches the sky and saves a short clip around anything that crosses it • Aiming overlay showing planets, bright stars, meteor radiants and the Moon WHERE TO POINT Most apps show you where a shower's radiant is. Starlapse tells you where to aim, which is not the same place: meteors streak away from the radiant, so the longest trails appear 40° off to the side. It works that out from your location and the time, keeps you clear of the Moon, and picks a height a tripod can actually hold. FOCUS, WHICH IS THE HARD PART Autofocus cannot see a night sky — there is no contrast to hunt on — and the infinity mark is not exactly infinity: it is a mechanical end stop, and the sharp point sits slightly inside it, at a place that differs between lenses and drifts as the phone cools. Starlapse steps the lens across its range, measures how large the stars come out at each position, and settles on the smallest. It takes about a minute and it is the difference between a night's work and a night of soft dots. DEVELOP AFTERWARDS The stack is kept as accumulated light, not as a finished picture. When the exposure ends you can move the curve — stretch, black point, exposure, saturation — and it re-develops from the original data. Same latitude a RAW file gives you, which matters when you are judging a night sky on a phone screen in the dark. The curve is asinh, the one professional astronomical imaging uses. It lifts the faint Milky Way out of the noise while bright stars keep their cores and their colour instead of clipping to white discs. HONEST LIMITS • Aperture is fixed on iPhone. It is a property of the lens, not a setting. The app shows the f-number and what each lens gives up, and lets you choose — that is all any app can do here. • A single frame is about one second. Everything longer is stacked, and the interface always shows the arithmetic: "10 min of light = 600 × 1.00s". • Capture cannot run in the background. iOS stops the camera when an app leaves the screen. Starlapse keeps the screen on and dims it instead. • You need a tripod. An hour of stacking on a handheld phone is an hour of nothing. PRIVACY No account, no server, no analytics, and no network code at all. Location and motion are used on the device to work out where to aim, and never leave it. The source is public — github.com/fortunto2/starlapse — so that claim is checkable rather than merely asserted.