Camera 01

Inspiration

I am a serious photography hobbyist. However phones are much easier to carry day to day. One day I found chatgpt can make phone photos look like they were taken with serious gear by serious people (at low resolutions at least). I also find film cameras more enjoyable as they make each shot more precious and intentional, and does not allow you to see the photo taken immediately while the scene is right in front of you, which creates a sense of anticipation and variable reward. Let's recreate this experience on the phone to make it accessible.

What it does

Fullscreen app UI that looks like what a classic film camera would look like if it's portrait. Small viewfinder in the corner. Mechanical operation with haptic feedback and sound. Takes 24 photos in a film roll. Can't see the photos immediately after. When the film roll is done, takes 24h to develop, during which they're sent to OpenAI's api for processing to make it look like it's shot on a professional camera by a professional photographer. 24h later the photos are ready and notifies the user.

How we built it

Entirely with codex. It generated all the images, sound, code, and helped with development, deployment, and testing. Codex mac app. Mainly on 1 session but a few occasional worktrees.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the phone image to look good too many iterations. It has a hard time refining it over many iterations without something regressing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The end product feels magical.

What we learned

Codex is very capable with iOS development. Iterating over image assets remain difficult.

What's next for Camera 01

Publish on the app store, add more original cameras, films, lenses etc. Add manual control options and sharing features etc. Make enjoyable photography accessible!

Built With

• codex