Video: Made in America HipstaPak Debut at New York Fashion Week
Fun video, fun party, with so much great photography by the fashion designers.
Posts tagged hipstamatic
Do Instagram photos “cheat the viewer”? I don’t think so
That’s the claim in a CNN article (“Why Instagram photos cheat the viewer”) by photojournalist Nick Stern.
“The app photographer hasn’t spent years learning his or her trade, imagining the scene, waiting for the light to fall just right, swapping lenses and switching angles,” he writes. “They haven’t spent hours in the dark room, leaning over trays of noxious chemicals until the early hours of the morning.”
I don’t see it that way. To me, apps are just another tool in the photographer’s arsenal, and many other photographers, professional photojournalists included, see it that way too. Just read what New York Times photographer Damon Winter had to say about his Hipstamatic images from the war in Afghanistan, “Through My Eye, Not Hipstamatic’s.”
But Stern seems to bristle just at the idea of photography apps. “Every time a news organization uses a Hipstamatic or Instagram-style picture in a news report, they are cheating us all,” he says. “It’s not the photographer who has communicated the emotion into the images. It’s not the pain, the suffering or the horror that is showing through. It’s the work of an app designer in Palo Alto who decided that a nice shallow focus and dark faded border would bring out the best in the image.” He later adds: “Hipstamatic, Instagram and other apps produce images that are equally unethical or perhaps even more so. The image never existed in any other place than the eye of the app developer.”
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. What about the effects produced by lenses, films, and other photographic tools? Those tools were not created by the photographer—they were created by the likes of Kodak and Fuji and Nikon—but they were used by the photographer, and they reflect the photographer’s vision. Certainly apps take this to another level, and news organizations shouldn’t pump of over-processed images and consider them photojournalism. But there’s little evidence that that’s happening. If anything, news organizations are being careful in using images from these apps. Where’s the evidence of journalistic standards eroding, rather than evolving?
“Strangely enough, in the great digital-imaging frontier that has passed Kodak by, consumers are increasingly prey to crippling nostalgias of their own. The hip adopters of digital photography have gone retro. One of the biggest photo apps on the iPhone is Hipstamatic – a program that uses filters and faux-aging features such as film scratches and waterspots to simulate the look of the Kodak-era snapshot: something imperfect, unrepeatable and historically contingent. Such imperfections should be central to photography, which is, after all, devoted to capturing the fleeting character of human perception in a single, irreducible instant.”
Writer Chris Lehmann, writing in In These Times
From a short essay, “A Hipstamatic Moment,” dealing with Kodak’s bankruptcy and how “we still crave the instant nostalgia that was once the company’s hallmark.”
From TheNextWeb: “The exhibition is yet another reminder of how smartphones equipped with decent cameras are changing the photography landscape as we know it. Apple and its community alone, with a lot of help from apps like Instagram, have had a significant effect on photography, while Polaroid has attempted to take a different tactic bringing Android to the camera-world instead of a camera to the smartphone world, with its Android-powered SC1630.”
Hipstamatic and fashion photographer Chiun-Kai Shih debut Made in America FreePak at New York Fashion Week
Sounds like a fun collaboration.
Here’s a press release on this:
Hipstamatic today announced it has partnered with fashion icon and photographer, Chiun-Kai Shih, to create the Made in America FreePak, a limited edition lens and case, just in time for New York Fashion Week.
Inspired by this season’s aesthetic, the Made in America FreePak lets users effortlessly snap pictures with a reinvented look of classic beauty…. From February 8th-16th, users can download this fashion-inspired must-have lens and case for free. Beginning on February 17th, Hipstamatic will add two films, and the Made in America HipstaPak (lens, case, and two films) will go on sale for $0.99.
“A melting pot of people and ideas, America is a place where people have the freedom to create. We hope the Americana lens encourages Hipstamatic users to capture their own journeys, redefining what it means to live in America” said Lucas Buick, founder of Hipstamatic. “This year, we’re urging people to put their own spin on ‘Americana,’ and inspire others through visual storytelling.”
Curated Fashion Showcase, New York City
To celebrate the collaboration, Hipstamatic and Shih have given nine designers early access to the Americana lens to capture their journeys through New York Fashion Week, culminating in a curated fashion showcase on February 16, 2012, at a gallery in New York City.
“America is made up of millions of voices, visions, and ideas,” said Shih. “I wanted to create a lens with Hipstamatic and a showcase for the raw talent that survives and thrives as part of the American dream.”
The following designers will each have several Hipstamatic prints shot with the Americana lens on display: 3X1 Made Here Jeans, BILLYKIRK, Cole Haan Robert Geller, Saturday Surf NYC, Steven Alan, Read’s Clothing Project, Title of Work, and 16 sur 20.
Stop-motion film with Hipstamatic — and how to do it
I really want to try one of these. And here’s a CNET article explaining how.
Music video of “So Far Away” mashes together Hipstamatic photos
I just love this sort of thing. According to Spin, “Brooklyn noise artisans A Place to Bury Strangers presumably did not record their February 7 EP Onwards to the Wall on their iPhones. They did, however, make a video that way.” The video is “comprised of snapshots singer-guitarist Oliver Ackermann took while using the Ina 1969 film.” So great.
If you like that, check out this one with 4,000 Hipstamatic images.
“Our design philosophy is about romantic experiences, and things that have been lost in the transition from analog to the digital age.”
Lucas Buick, co-founder and CEO of Synthetic, the company behind Hipstamatic
