Attaining Imperfection

Like most people with a modern phone, I like playing with applications that emulate the look of various types old film when taking pictures. Namely:

Hipstamatic:

CameraBag:

And the latest app darling, Instagram:

As it happens, I knew one of the founders of Instagram years ago in undergrad, and he was a nice fellow, so I’ve been using the app.

Is it silly to degrade the quality of a digital image so that it evokes more difficult and more imperfect media? No. So long as you keep copies of the unfiltered photo, of course. Film prints and instant or cheap camera images with light leaks, chromatic aberrations, and other such antiquated ‘imperfections’ evoke the nostalgic sensation of flipping through old family photo albums of birthdays and Christmases past, of ancestors, and lithe parents with newborns. The musk of ancient paper, the crackle of the protective plastic… The experience may not be universal, but the romance of an idealized past, however imaginative and far from facts, can be quite appealing.

As with all art, the associations and emotional connotations that are called forth by an image or sentence or song are more important than the literal representation.

Moreover, applying such effects is an act of discovery, just like making prints in the dim red light of dark room. Actual photo and print development is its own difficult art form and technical exercise, but the digitization and instant gratification of photo apps provide similar satisfaction – without the hard work.

Sorry for my word salad; here are some more pictures. I’ve enjoyed working with 35mm film, but it is a time-consuming and expensive hobby. For reference and contrast from the previous images, here are some of my actual photographs taken on cameras that actually make a clicking sound that isn’t prerecorded:

Well, to tell the truth, photo apps are popular because they have sex appeal: we see celebrities and rock stars and models represented in such stylized forms of photography on album covers and in movies, and we want to be among them. But reminiscing about photo albums makes for a nicer story.

iPad is more Disney than Disney

The form factor and interactivity of the iPad makes me excited for the future of digital print media, but I wonder how standardization will occur across different hardware platforms running different OS’s.

The idea of stale PDF-style documents is dead, and yet HTML is not currently sufficient to provide application-style interactivity. Flash filled a gap, but Apple killed that. When Windows-based or Linux-based svelte tablets arrive, how do present media in a standard that is perfect in all platforms?

For these new generation of portable, casual computers, web pages need to be completely reinvented. I also think, related to that particular venue in which the interface is essentially invisible, that content will no longer be free – because a digital, interactive magazine will never be able to support itself simply with ad revenue. I subscribe to a cable provider to have a huge variety of content available all of the time; I subscribe to Netflix to consume movie after movie at a flat rate; I subscribe to a few magazines so that I can always have fresh words to read; in the end, everything that is worth attention will fall behind subscription paywalls.

It might be sad to think that, but I also think that now is a very exciting time.

Sony’s 3D Display

Similar displays exist with rapidly spinning blinky light mechanisms that utilize persistence of vision. You know? tough to explain. It’s hard to tell if this has an internal spinny thing, or if it is, possibly, a suspended three dimensional grid of lights, creating an effect where each light represents a single block, as if images are constructed like Legos, but with individual points of light.

Bottom of the Sea

Mr. Joel Johnson shot a nice video for his Gizmodo review of some waterproof camera gear. The music makes the video. You’ll wanna see the HD version on Vimeo.

Fun with the Fisheye Lomography Camera

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Nowadays my phone is my most-often-used camera, which is unfortunate because of its lack of quality but advantageous because I always have it with me. When I want to take ‘serious’ pictures, i.e. pictures that look halfway decent, I use a Panasonic Lumix DMC LZ2—it ran me about two hundred bucks four years ago, and it takes sharp images with vivid colors with a compact 6x zoom lens. I hear the newest Lumix brand cameras are really nice too.

But I’ve also enjoyed shooting film over the past few years. Just 35mm, sometimes black and white. If you have a dark room, it’s fun to make prints directly from black and white projections onto light-sensitive paper, but that’s not my favorite part of the process; I wasn’t very good at it! It is neat to see the images appear in the chemical baths, though.

I prefer shooting color transparent slide film. The disadvantage to slides is that it’s difficult to get good scans; inevitably there ends up being a lot of post-processing to attain what they ‘really’ look like, when I hold the slides up to the sunlight and squint at the tiny frames. They’re also relatively expensive.

With all this in mind I purchased a Fisheye Lomography camera. A lomo camera is one typically made of plastic parts, with a plastic lens; the inaccuracies of the camera result in compelling images with bleeding colors. With an SLR you might be trying to get a sharp, real-to-life image, but lomography allows for dream-like surreal scenes that appear to be from another era.

It’s a neat camera for about fifty bucks, and this model takes 35mm film. Usually I enjoy using zoom lenses to capture small slices of a larger scene, and to make myself invisible to the subject. I chose the fisheye lens, though, because it is essentially the opposite of a zoom lens and it would be a challenge to use.

The fisheye lens squishes a whole scene into a small space, which means a close-up subject become surprisingly small. You practically have to put the camera against someone’s nose if you want them to take up most of the frame! In fact, the lens has a crazy depth of field that ranges from about three inches to infinity— you can’t adjust it, and the whole scene is in focus.

Since I don’t like people to be aware of the camera, this makes photography with the lomo difficult! You have to be really sly to take a picture three inches away from someone without them knowing— or at least, without them reacting in the picture. This would be a good camera to takes pictures of friends, however, I really only carry a camera when I’m by myself.

The other interesting thing about this camera is that you can’t adjust the exposure, so sunlight is a must. I haven’t experimented with the flash because I prefer daylight. These shots are from 400 speed film and some were underexposed, surprisingly.

The other big thing is that you can’t see what you’re shooting! There’s a semi-functional viewfinder that approximates the fisheye lens, but it’s entirely perfunctory. Instead, you just use your eyes and your gut and you point and shoot. I often shoot from the hip. It’s fun, in contrast to all the buttons and switches of most SLRs. Then again, film is unforgiving and irrevocable so a lot of shots are wasted.

These pictures are with high quality Fuji film, color transparent slides. Almost ten bucks a pop, with about thirty photos on a roll. I don’t remember what their brand is called. Kodak stuff is great too, but a little more expensive. The colors really shout, but like I said, it’s difficult to get good digital scans. People often use cheap grocery store negative color film in lomo cameras, anyway; of course the cost is appealing but I haven’t tried it yet.

The long and short of it is that it’s a fun camera for the price, but I still use my digital camera if I want sharp, clear images.