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| Polaroid Spectra SE I found in a box underneath my house. Surprised it even turned on the first time. |
There's a bit of irony in taking a photo of a Polaroid camera with a phone using an app that emulates polaroids. It seems fitting, given the trend lately to turn crisp, sharp, and neutral digital base photos into something snappier and aesthetically pleasing. It's the same reason any decent photographer will spend a few minutes punching up or punching down the contrast, sharpening, blurring, tinting or correcting colors.
Digital photos start off looking flat. You have to work it like a lump of clay, turning it into something worth while. Slight changes can have profound affects on presentation.
Sure, phones have had cameras built in for years. But you could never go beyond general exposure and contrast, a few gimmicky filters like sepia and solarization. It was never exciting! Rarely did it ever make an image better (I know it never did on my LG Chocolate). It wasn't as if the cameras were anything to write home about. It was an afterthought to sell phones.
It would take the iphone to push better cameras into phones and force phone manufactures to consider phones the way camera manufactures considered their cameras. Granted the features grew with each iteration as well. Some phones touted 1080 video, carl zeis lenses, 12 megapixels, HDR built in, etc. Anything to stand out. As if to say"me too".
I had the iphone 3g. It took photos, had slightly better filters than my LG, but it was still nothing to write home about. Neither was my HTC Hero. Decent photos, but it was just a carbon copy of the original.
This is where apps like Instagram, Aviary, Twitter's new filter set, Fx Camera, and the like come into play. They're Photoshop for the rest of us. Easy to use controls that emulate films and create certain looks that photographers would work out in their photo editor of choice. There is no need to upload to your computer, the big learning curve avoided, and best of all, sharing to your friends instantly (like posting up your drawings to a fridge for all to see). These apps make photo manipulation a snap for anyone - even kids.
It's just striking to see the blank uniform look of digital turned into the overexposed, under exposed, grainy, heavily tinted, light-leaked, vignetted, framed analogue photos of yesteryear.
What's more striking are the kids who use these filter apps daily but have never touched an analogue camera. Recently, I was at a skate competition, snapping photos with my Polaroid OneStep and Impossible Color Protection film. A kid walked up to me and asked what I was doing. I said taking photos.
"That's a camera?"
"Yeah, here's some of the photos I've taken so far." I pulled out the film from a small box.
"Oh! So it's like Instagram?"
I bit my tongue. "Yes, but this is what Instagram is used off. It's called a Polaroid."
He paused a second. "Is it like that song, shake it like a polaroid?"
I kindly found a reason to walk off.
He wasn't older than 16. The camera in my hands was older than him! It just made me stop in my tracks, thinking I had grown up with film. My first cameras were a Polaroid OneStep and a Canon AE-1. I used to have film developed at drug stores as late as 2003. All this kid knew about film was it was a look you could select on a phone on a whim.
It was a surreal realization. But no more surreal than deciding I needed a Polaroid border and 3 filters to make my Spectra photo look more vintage.
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