There are quite a few people who have forsaken the quest for higher image fidelity, and gone the other direction to Toy Cameras like the Holga or Diana.
I often like those pictures. And I'd like to try to make some. But I'm held back by two things: I don't know of any which are digital, and I'd be frigged before I'll process and scan film. And also I'm emotionally leery of giving up the potential of high image quality if a picture turns out to be really good.
So maybe I could find a way to process high quality images to look like these pictures. Shouldn't be tough, if somebody has made a filter for it, surely a one-click process.
But here's the interesting thing: I suspect this wouldn't feel "genuine" to me. Why the heck not?
1 comment:
These photos are wonderful. Lo-fi tends to leave more room for the mind to process the "message" of the picture. This is more difficult when the brain is assaulted by all the detail in a crisp digital image.
I doubt you could mimic this effect using digital filtering, though. Likewise, in the field of audio engineering, there's still no way to digitally reproduce the magic that happens when recording on analog tape.
Not that it wouldn't be theoretically possible. But somehow, when you attempt to model the process in an algorithm, and then apply it, it is too static to be interesting. And even if you attempt to model the fluctuations of analog media in the process, it then ends up being too predictably non-static to be interesting.
It's as if when using analog media, the chemical/magnetic process in each capture is a once in a lifetime event that will never repeat the same.
Maybe it is theoretically impossible.
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