Hipsta-matic.

There is a quirky little interest that some photographers have — what used to be really bad is now highly desirable.  Old crummy and funky Instamatic cameras, old box cameras with plastic lenses that have weird distortions and inappropriate flashes in the exposure — these are highly desirable cameras now.  People haunt yard sales and thrift stores looking for these because of their unique “flaws”.  You probably don’t realize it, but each Instamatic has its own unique “fingerprint” of distortions.

Of course nobody has a darkroom any more, and you can barely even buy film any more, fergoshsakes.  So it was only a question of time before people started creating digital versions of these old chestnuts, the very same cheap cameras that were so irritating at the time.  But the VERY best part of this fun craft is that you don’t need a special camera, the effects can be put on after the image is taken.  Many photo editing programs now have this feature, in addition to grunge, textures, etc.

My favorite, though, is an app called Hipstamatic on the iPhone.  It is unique because you get an image of the back of one of these old cameras, with a little viewfinder and a button on the screen to tap, so the experience is very much like using an old Instamatic. And the image is saved with the Instamatic effects: yellow and green tints, mottled light, distortions, weirdly cropped.

Personally, I love this. I gravitate towards grainy, blurry images anyway, because they seem spontaneous and more about the moment being captured than the craft of getting everything pixel-perfect.

The buddha pic above is an unretouched Hipstamatic print, just a little cropping.  These prints come out better without the cropping though, because it puts a white border around the (square) image, the way prints used to look decades ago.  Either way, it is nostalgic and evocative.