iPhone photography apps are big business and it seems a week doesn't go by without some new, arty-retro effort springing forth; and although there are many of a very high standard, that will no doubt  enhance your photos in many ways, the practical value of such apps could be brought into question.

This App of the Day, however, makes for a great little photography tool - especially for those wanting a cheap and easy way of improving in their chosen sport.

Burst Mode

Format

iPhone

Price

£1.49

Where

iTunes

As mentioned we can mainly see this photography app being used by the amateur sportsman, as it enables your iPhone to shoot stills at up to 24fps and up to 400 frames at a time. 

In use the app itself is very simple; on booting up Burst Mode you'll get your iPhone's camera with a shoot button and settings button. The former being self-explanatory, the Burst Mode setting gives you control over a self-timer, giving you 3, 5 and 10 second delays; Burst Speed, from 1- 24fps; and Number of Frames, from 5 up to 400 - pretty much all you could want.

What this delivers is an excellent way of analysing a brief moving image whilst playing sport - say a table tennis stroke, or your cue action whilst playing snooker. It's true that the 24fps the app gives isn't quite the 30fps of the native iPhone 4 video capabilities, but the fact that you can analyse this frame by frame and then easily play it back means the action is packaged in the right way.

We tested it playing table tennis and kicking a football, and in both cases it showed up errors in body position and timing. And although, clearly, some of the action becomes blurred it still offers up a useful and cheap way of attempting to correct common mistakes that might otherwise go uncorrected.

You can scroll through each individual frame and select the ones of interest or you can use the playback mode to run the frame as a video.

The Burst Mode app also offers up other possibilities when a need arises to capture a particular shot; we can imagine it being useful for capturing that magical moment when a child stays upright on a bike for the first time; the expression due to fear of falling turning into one of elation captured in one continuous stream. However, anything faster and blurring will become an issue.

And despite our earlier claims that this app has a purely practical function it does offer up opportunities for the more creative amongst you.

For £1.49 it's a bit of an investment, but if you think you'll get use out of it, it's definitely worth consideration.

We've placed a few frames in sequence in the pics below, click through and it should give you a sense of the app.