Faux Vintage Digital Photography

481 Words2 Pages
Faux-Vintage Digital Photography If you were to peruse anyone’s Facebook page, you would find an influx of user uploaded photographs incorporating the use of some sort of faux-vintage filter. This popular trend seems to be increasing exponentially. When looking at the conceivable reasons behind this, a combination of things come to mind. The union of social media websites and applications, widespread access to mobile phone cameras, a longing for nostalgia and realness, and increasing individual self-importance seem to be at the helm. What is ironic is the act of using a high-resolution mobile phone camera to take a photograph, and then adding a filter to make it look as though it was taken 50 years ago. Also, these photos are made to look like actual analog photographs with physical imperfections even though they do not exist in the physical world. And lastly, this trend seems to follow a younger generation with little to no experience with this type of photography, so it is not even their own personal nostalgia that they are trying to induce. Social media platforms such as Facebook serve as digital walks down memory lane, combining photo collections and journal entries. People take care building profiles that portray their lives in creative ways in an attempt to set themselves apart from others. With constant access to the use of mobile phone cameras, users can photo-document their lives and use various applications to edit these photographs to add a sense of seemingly artistic individuality. Applications such as Instagram and Hipstamatic give the user the ability to shoot retro photographs that appear to have been taken long ago using analog cameras, such as Lomographic and Polaroid. With a mere swipe of the finger one can fade the outer edges, over- or under-saturate the color, blur areas to indicate a shallow depth of field, add light leaks, adjust the

More about Faux Vintage Digital Photography

Open Document