Chase Jarvis coined the phrase ‘The best camera is the one that is with you’, and while I agree that a crappy photo is sometimes better than no photo at all, generally speaking, I think cameras in phones suck. Yeah, they’re convenient, but unless you’re a teenage girl posting a new profile picture to your MySpace, they’re basically useless. But that was all before I found ShakeItPhoto.
ShakeItPhoto is a $0.99 app for the iPhone that turns the built-in, high tech, digital camera into a low-fi, instant camera. It simulates this analog technology right down to the mechanical sounds of the film ejecting and the leisurely reveal of the image through milky streaks of reagent. The app even requires you to shake your iPhone to get the image to appear. That last part is a bit annoying and only works to perpetuate the notion that shaking a polaroid ever did anything but exercise your wrist, but it’s a small price to pay.
That’s all just the interface of the app. The real magic lies in the images it creates. ShakeItPhoto uses the old square format from the most popular instant cameras. It applies some basic filters to increase contrast and saturation. It also applies a vignette and a photo realistic paper frame to complete the retro effect. You can take pictures right from the app or choose existing photos from your library upon which to apply the unique set of filters that make your images look instantly timeless.
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Image captured with an iPhone 3G
Same image processed with ShakeItPhoto
And why do the images look so good? One could argue there are several reasons, but in my opinion the most important is the “surprise.” Just like with my old SX-70, I’m never quite sure how an image is going to turn out. And usually it’s better than I expect. But unlike my SX-70, it doesn’t cost me $1.50 a shot, so I’m more apt to experiment with this camera, resulting in more interesting images. It’s also friendlier to the environment. Every pack of Polaroid film had it’s own power supply, which meant tossing one battery into the trash for every 10 shots you took. So far I’ve taken approximately 640 shots with ShakeItPhoto, meaning there are 64 fewer batteries leaking toxins into the soil.
Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid instant film and cameras, created the technology to try and remove the barriers between the photographer and his subject. While the Polaroid instant camera may be all but dead, ShakeItPhoto has the potential to attain this goal more effectively with it’s simple application than Polaroid ever did. Everyone in my studio is hooked on the app and there’s already a ShakeItPhoto Flickr group of over 580 members displaying some 15,000 images. I’ll venture to state that if Edwin were still alive, he’d be just as excited about this application as we are. He’d also be pissed he didn’t think of it first.
Despite the silly name and the unnecessary shaking, ShakeItPhoto has done more to get me excited about taking pictures with my phone that anything has before.
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Other noteworthy photo apps for the iPhone are Camera Bag and Hipstamatic. Both allow you to chose between different camera types and styles that create some interesting effects. If you want even more control of your digital images, Alien Skin has a PhotoShop plugin called Exposure 2 which allows you to simulate any and all types of film with some pretty powerful and amazing affects.
Links
ShakeItPhoto Website
ShakeItPhoto Flickr Set
Your Voice
What do you think? Fill in the form below to submit any discussion points you like to raise and we'll do our best to get a debate going, in the immortal words of Bob Hoskins, it's good to talk.
If you go into the shakeit prefs you can tweak so you don’t have to get so jiggy with the wrist.
I saw recently that a friend was regularly posting his pictures on facebook after applying the ShakeIt app and thought he must have bagged himself a nice vintage camera and started to process his own pictures. After closer inspection, the giveaway was obviously the replica frame.
There’s no denying that this app does wonders for turning a crappy mobile pic into something much more appealing but it’s hard not to feel a slight sense of disappointment once you realise that the images aren’t what they at first appear to be.
I guess this is just another instance of an ever-pervading feeling that we find ourselves living in an age of simulation and facsimile, where everything is starting to feel less and less ‘real’…
Bromers, I tweaked the shake in the settings but they need to make it an option to disable completely.
Jimmy, thanks for your comment. I agree that it would be way cooler if all these images were shot with a vintage camera, but the truth is that none of these images would exist if we relied on that old technology.
I think the makers of ShakeItPhoto should have several versions of the photo frame that get applied randomly so as not to be so obvious that it’s a fake.
I totally agree Joshua, the advent of digital photography has created opportunities for photographs that might have been previously impossible to capture.
As a child of the early 80s, I think my generation are in a unique position where they’ve grown up being photographed on film but have seen digital technology take over once they’ve decided to pick up a camera for themselves.
I’d probably feel incapable of existence if you took away my digital camera, mobile phone, iPod and laptop but part of me longs for the days before we relied so heavily on all these wonderful things, when we weren’t used to technology being superseded on quite such a regular basis.
Just useless, rose-tinted nostalgia talking I guess!
Lovely images Joshua. My application of choice is Hipstamatic and love being able to change lenses and film to vary my images. I would also agree with what Jimmy was saying about actually using a vintage/lomo/toy camera to get the true effects.
I actually bought a Holga camera recently, but the whole experience of processing a film seems so much more laboured and lengthy now we have been accustomed to digital cameras. As such I have only got round to developing one film and only 20% of the images were ‘keepers’.
I see these apps not as replacements for my cameras, but if I do want /need to take a picture with my iPhone, then I would prefer it to have the extra character they provide.
Nice app, I shall check it out. Worth mentioning the weirdly named Toy Camera as well. Gives a nice effect without the framing. Lots of different settings to try as well. Also by the same guy is Quadcamera which imitates the 4 shot Lomo sampler.
I agree, there’s only so much romanticism one can hold for shooting Polaroid (I actually still shoot Polaroid on my SLR 680 and I often take a $3-a-pop picture just to find out it looks crap), but I think the appeal of polaroids is the physicality of the actual object. Something you can hold in your hand or find in a box 5 years after you took it.
Whilst I do love ShakeItPhoto and use it religiously, photos taken on my phone either live on my phone, on Facebook, or on Flickr. I’ll look at them once or twice then it’ll just get lost in a world of digital content. My mantlepiece at home has a line-up of about 30 Polaroids on it which I happen to look at every day. If we bothered to print out our ShakeItPhoto’s onto nice glossy squares of paper and add a little frame around them, I’m sure they’d have exactly the same appeal. But we never do.
I whole-heartedly agree with everyone that actual printed film is better than a digital simulation. No question. The point of the article wasn’t to say that ShakeItPhoto (or any other similar application) was better than the technology it replicates, but rather it’s better than the shots I used to get with built-in camera on my phone. There are obvious advantages to the digital version (convenience, more earth-friendly, easier to share) but when comparing it to an actual polaroid, it’s only a facsimile of the genuine article. However since we all share our photos digitally, the disparity between the real deal and the digital isn’t as apparent because you aren’t putting it on your mantel or holding it in your hand. The same could be said for a an actual polaroid that you scanned and shared online.
You’re right, that wasn’t the point of your article at all. You know me, I like to take things off on a tangent!
Tommy C! Always on the tangents! But that’s where the good stuff is found.
For me, TiltShift Generator seems to be the perfect app for getting crap pictures into great-looking photos. Hipstamatic is just what its name says, nothing more than a hipster’s toy — you waste too much time with the cool lenses and flashy interface and too little time taking photos.
NB says goodbye to Polaroid…
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2010/january/nb-marks-the-end-of-the-polaroid-era
iancu, Agreed. Hipstamatic is too fussy.
Tom, that’s a cool project. Thanks for sharing. I especially like the work of John Ross because it speaks to a component of instant film that i think people today forget. Back in then if you wanted to take photos of an extremely private nature, the only way to keep them private (aside from processing them yourself) was to use instant film.
I actually really like the basic camera on my iPhone without any app or filter. It reminds me of old polaroids or cameras just as is. Theres a nice grainy blurry effect and I have taken some pics with my camera that I could frame and stick on my wall.
Thanks for the article.
Downloaded the App and am enjoying it greatly.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/landres/sets/72157623325821445/