FCamera is an open-source camera application for the N900. You can use it as an alternative to the built-in camera application. It provides significantly more manual control over capture parameters, and shoots raw (in the Adobe DNG format). It also includes some nifty features. It has an automatic HDR mode, which has an HDR viewfinder that lets you preview the full range to be captured. It has a "lucky imaging" mode in which it takes a burst of shots and only saves the sharpest. We've found that this simple trick lets you handhold exposures of up to half a second.

FCamera really has two purposes. It a useful camera application for photographers. It is also a base camera application that students and hobbyists can modify to experiment with new photographic techniques. Given the second requirement, we've tried to be fairly careful about balancing features versus the impact they have on ease-of-understanding of the source. In most cases we've favored the simpler source code, which is why you don't see a lot of custom widgets or fancy icons. That said, it could always be simpler. We welcome any patches to streamline and clarify FCamera's source.

The FCamera binary is in the Maemo extras repository. To install FCamera on your N900 do the following:

1. Load the Application Manager if it isn't already open.
2. Select the update button and wait a while.
3. Then go to Download->Multimedia, and start typing 'fcamera'.
4. FCamera should now be visible. Select it to install it.
5. If this is the first time you've installed an FCam application, you will be prompted to reboot your N900. Do so or else FCamera will not run properly.

You can download the FCamera source through extras, or on the downloads page, or you can check out the most recent development version using anonymous subversion like so:

svn checkout https://vcs.maemo.org/svn/fcam/fcamera/trunk ./fcamera

In addition to FCamera, you'll need the underlying FCam API itself. There are several options for getting it:

• Download FCam.zip from our downloads page, and extract it somewhere. This includes examples and documentation. In the latter case, you'll need to rename fcamera.local.template.pro to fcamera.local.pro, and edit it to point it at your FCam directory.
• Check the latest version out of SVN with: svn checkout https://vcs.maemo.org/svn/fcam/fcam-dev/trunk ./fcam-dev
• Install the fcam-dev Debian package in your development environment, either from extras, or from our downloads page. This will not provide API documentation.

If you are new to N900 development, we recommend you read the getting started section to get yourself oriented.

We've prepared a PDF that describes the role of all of the classes within FCamera, and which files they live in. We hope it is of use.