Mouse.

Glitter.

Dutch Angles.

A flower.

The same flower...

WITH A FREAKING DUTCH ANGLE! OH MY GOSH. OH MY GOSH. OH MY FREAKING GOSH, IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL, SO WONDERFUL, SO SUBLIME. I'M (OH MY GOSH) HAVING A HEART ATTACK. IT IS SO DEEP. I AM A REAL PHOTOGRAPHER NOW; I HAVE MASTERED THE DUTCH ANGLE!1 OHHHHHHHHH MYYYYYYYY GOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!1!!1112!!12!!!12@1!@!!!!!1!!Q!!!1

And yes, my feet really are that cute.

In Defense of the Plastic Camera

I recently bought a Holga 35mm for myself. It cost me roughly 50 dollars. On top of that, each roll of film costs around three dollars and getting them produced at the drug store will put me back another 10 dollars.

X = 50 + (2.99 + 9.95)(x)/24

Or, something like that. On second thought, I pretty much failed Algebra.

But don’t get me wrong. Opening up that envelope and pulling those glossy photographs out and seeing them for the very first time is nothing short of Christmas. It’s (I hate saying this) like a drug. You do it once, and you can't help but do it again.

From the first batch.

I've been wanting a lomographic camera for years, and once I finally got my hands on one, It was all I'd hoped it to be. How would have thought that a cheaply made hunk of plastic could be such a bundle of joy?

Here I am, madly in love with my Holga and I see see the bane of the lomographic world pop up on the internet like bacterium on a petri dish. Counterfeits.

At first, I'm mildly amused. Then I become a little ticked off. Soon, I'm particularly annoyed. At this point I'm frothing at the mouth with anger.

Taken with a shutter of 1/100 (to mimic a Holga's) with a perfectly reliable digital camera. Excuse the debris on the lens.

Here is the same image, which I ran through a "Lomo-ish" filter.

While Science fiction is one of my favorite genres, I tend to shrug off the whole “technology is going to take over our lives/the world” idea. I usually dismiss it as being either too clichéd, too farfetched or an idea that I just can’t apply to myself. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that, no, there won’t be robot nannies or a hostile army of homicidal super-robots in the near future, but we will have replaced some of the simplest, yet sometimes the most wonderful, things to make our lives easier, more organized, and more convenient.

Perhaps we forget the singularly unreproducible sublimity about fingers dancing on piano keys, or a needle pulling thread, or knowing that your dog loves you and you love him back, and, I’ll venture to say that there is that same sublimity in photons flying at lightening speeds through a plastic lens and ultimately articulating a world that can only be seen with a Holga. We can’t allow those things to be replaced by computer-powered synthesizers or sweat-houses with sad excuses for sewing machines or (day I say it) Nitendogs. We can’t let the simple beauty of plastic cameras be overshadowed by Smartphone apps for the sake of convenience.

I think the Luddites were on to something. I’m serious.

You may think that there is little difference, but the images that plastic cameras lovingly produce are nothing short of magical. The vignetting that appears is there because that’s how the light rays play upon the film, not because a computer program painted on darkened corners. The image is rendered dreamily blurred and vivid because it was seen through plastic lenses, not because the image was artificially smudged and the saturation hiked up. A plastic camera produces living, breathing photographs, not patterns of pixels on a LCD touch screen.

Get one and fall in love. Get one and take it with you everywhere. Get one and make it your best friend. Get one and cry with it. Get one and laugh with it. Get one and feel hip. Get one and feel stupid. If anything, get one before I feel obliged to smash in the screen of your iPhone.

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