Talk about conflicted. I’m browsing through facebook the other day and see some photos from an old friend (aquaintance), and I see all these trippy looking shots. But wait, this dude doesn’t have a creative bone in his body, so what gives? I doubt my old friend has taken a darkroom class. Could it be that my long lost pal from Orange County has been turned on to the holga culture? Nope. He’s found hipstamatic and he has become, well….”hip.” Is this a good thing, or do you somehow need to earn the right to this level of creativity? Is it sacrilege to use a digital facsimile to imitate a 1960′s look? I do it to some extent in my shop when we apply a sloppy border mask via photoshop.
When I first saw hipstamatic or “losermatic” as I heard someone say, I thought, man this is genius. I know we all wish we would have thought it up ourselves, but it pains us because it’s one more cool thing gone mainstream. I guess this reminds me of how I felt when I heard Nick Drake playing in a VW commercial. I wanted to puke because my beloved tortured folk singer was now stuck between sports and weather on the 6 o’clock news. So, if my 16 year old niece buys the Blackkeys black and white app and makes her phone shots into something fantastic, does that invalidate every print every made in a darkroom?
I’m the guy who coined the phrase, “my camera is not a phone, and my phone is not a camera.” Yet, is there some good that can come from Hipstamatic? Does it matter how we get exposed to coolness? Who needs art school, buy an app. Lot’s of questions from me today, so the verdict is….cool or lame?? I’m sayin’ lame, but I wish I would have thought it up first!
Would love to hear from all of you on this.
dh
The real deal, or shove it up your app.
If they come up with a cheaper way to make the images we want to make, great. I don’t care if that comes with access for your long lost pal from Orange County.
Fair enough Ben.
Lame. Phone-cameras are getting better in quality, enable in-the-moment posting and reporting, and are becoming a legitimate replacement for digital p&s cameras. Yet they are producing the “worst” images online now. My news feed on Facebook is full of dark, yellow images that frankly, I wish were clear so I could see what people wanted to share. Instead, they are sharing a fake nostalgia for cameras they never owned, taken from an era they never fully appreciated.
I am all for post-to-internet, automatic stitching, high definition video. People should keep the $3 they’d spend on an app for a latte to enjoy while they share real memories.
I don’t have an iPhone, but I’ve seen many, many great images processed via Hipstamatic that I often think about getting one merely for the opportunity to try it out.
The thing about such inventions as Hipstamatic is that people we thought (or who thought themselves) didn’t have creative bones in their bodies, begin to appreciate more what it means to be creative and begin to explore new artistic avenues on their own — without having to rely on applications.
Flickr has had a similar effect on a great number of people who — until they began receiving compliments on photos they were taking with point-and-shoot cameras — likely would never have considered taking photographs with a dSLR, much less professionally. Many photo careers have been launched thanks to that dynamic. Others, too, have begun discovering shooting with film and medium-format cameras after a little encouragement and/or seeing the non-digital photographs others were taking. (In fact, I had pretty much figured I no longer had any use for film until I starting playing with my Holga. I might even start hauling my RB ’round the city!)
So… yeah… I think Hipstamatic is cool. I think anything which helps to spread the notion that we all have an “inner artist” is great. We have — for too long — believed that only “special” people can be artists.
As someone who has recently gotten back into shooting with my Holga I am so conflicted about this. Mostly because the look the hipstmatic acheives is how I wish most of my Holga shots would turn out. And I hate thinking that people would confuse my film photos for an iphone photo. So I say lame. But I also know that if I had an iphone I would probably use that app.
Come in with your holga and a sample of what you are getting and I bet i can help you.
I get all of my film developed by you guys! And I’m actually pretty happy with the results I’m getting, but next time I’m in I will definitely ask if I have some specific questions.
Hipstamatic = very cool!
I’m not bothered by the hipstamtic. If people can get photo’s that look the way they want, and they are pleased with them, more power to them. I feel that a far worse trend, is glorifying toy camera photo’s just for the sake that they are shot on film. Just because you leave your negative frame on your photo, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good.
Zeus,
I mostly agree and a while back I posted about “too many holgas” One could argue that the toy cameras are another shortcut to “art” And the said art is not exactly groundbreaking. Thanks for your comment.
I felt equally conflicted. There’s even a current artist up RayKo who has taken a series of pictures all on his iPhone and various apps, including hipstamatic. At first I thought it was kind of lame and then kind of cool and then back again.
That and thy were cooler than what I could do on film…
The way I figure it is: photography is about the journey not just the end result. If they come out with cool pictures and learned nothing on the journey then they have gained much less. If they’ve taken their journey and come out with a hipstamatic then good for them. For some the apps will be the starting point, others the end.
For me? Lame. But not necessarily so?
Well said Syd.
“If people can get photo’s that look the way they want, and they are pleased with them, more power to them.”
I guess it comes down to that old chestnut, is art created without intention as valid as art created with intention.
I really can’t imagine that many of these people are really creating these compositions in their mind’s eye and using hipstamatic to capture them.
It is probably more that the pictures the hipstamatic allows them to create just look cool to them on the back of their eyePhone, so they post them to flickr and facebook.
Caveat: My blackberry takes crap pictures, so I am totally jealous of the photos people get out of their eyePhones. I also have no idea if hipstamatic images are created on the fly or it is some type of post-processing.
Lame. Definitely lame. Like you, I have a FB friend (not just an acquaintaince but family) who posts almost all his pictures with the hipstamatic effect. At first, it grabbed my attention, but after a while, it just seemed too fake for me, esp when I can get my 35mm Holga pics in about an hour. (Sorry, I haven’t used photoworkssf because of location. It’s been pretty much W/g for me or the local “closer to work” photo place for 120 film). I’m putting this blog on my blog list. Thanks for keeping film alive in SF!
I think it’s cool, but like all cool things they go mainstream and lose some of the cool factor. I was always the guy in high school that knew the cool indie bands before they went big, and then was pissed when I saw the school jock wearing their t-shirt. But I digress, art is art and if your cousin or friend is producing “cool” shots then maybe they are more creative than you thought. I don’t think that the medium should dictate the artistic quality of the work. It’s just that in this day and age I think we need to be a bit more selective about what we consider to be quality work.
I love Hipstamatic. Some people say there is no creativity involved because the app magically makes the photos look “like that”. Well, the app applied effects, yes. It’s up to you to choose the effects (lens/film/flash) that will work for the image you are capturing. And the effects don’t matter if the image is poorly composed and uninteresting.
It’s just another tool. Like a Lomo, or a Holga, or a Canon 5D2, or a Lensbaby, or….
Isn’t it about the images? If they look good, or make you feel something, or make you think, who cares how they were captured?
I came across this today.
Awesome!
Lame
I suppose it’s ‘lame’ to anyone who is artistically gifted, but I love it. I admit i haven’t got a ‘creative bone in my body’, but this app provides me with a medium by which i can attempt to be artistic. Punk photography, anyone?
it’s growing on me to…don’t tell anyone,
“punk” photography? i know punk died years ago, even before hot topic. but punk and iphone in the same breath? the corpse of joey ramone getting raped by an army of steve jobs nanoprobe bacteria is something no child should photograph.
The way I see it is if you’re a photographer, the camera shouldn’t matter. Can you imagine giving Ansel Adams an iPhone with the Hipstamatic or ShakeItPhoto app? I’d dig seeing what he’d come up with!
well i am artistic and i think the app is intriguing granted with everyone using it it does become rather mainstream … tho’ it is up to the photographer on which lenses to choose and how to make the effects work …
i would just like to make some photo’s with it and get the prints. i think it is pretty cool.
It’s not the camera , it’s the photographer .
This sums it up best.
Consider the nature of hand writing manuscripts on parchment versus the invention of the Gutenberg Press. Consider the writer who used a manual typewriter to print out a manuscript vs a modern day word processor. Consider the nature of print novels vs. ebooks.
In each of these cases there were concerns over the ease these tools made it for people to get books made. Worries about lots of crap flooding the market and thus the legitimacy of the medium.
This is largely a bogus argument. Yes, the easier something is the more of an influx of poor quality stuff gets hammered out, but time sorts it all out. The novelty wears off, the hobbyists go on to other things, the artists are left with a tool that makes their jobs easier.
I feel the same argument can be made with photography. I loved my first professional 35mm camera, but being poor couldn’t afford to take nearly as many pictures (or experiment) as much as I’d like.
Just my two cents.
You make some excellent points mossfoot. thanks
Sometimes you want to take a few snaps or some video of the kid and see what it looks like as an old photo or super8. It warm and cheerful and looks like how you expect a family snap to look.
I find it shocking that shitty photos should be seen as only the domain of artists. I have plenty of shitty photos in my parent’s albums. The idea that artists could co-op this look that comes from a source that is in the purest sense “of the people” – cheap optics on bad film – is ludicrous.