Is it, it can't be, Digital
10 34 Share TweetWe’ve all done it, someone comments or ‘likes’ your work and you go to check out theirs and you think their stuff is pretty good but once you’ve looked at 2 or 3 photos you realize they have a funny feeling about them, they’re dum dum dum… Digital!
With the popularity of Lomography cameras come knock-offs. As everyone seems to have a digital camera of some kind these days, the companies who make these cameras don’t want people going back to film, so they urge people to undertake different editing softwares such as photoshop- there are actually many step by step guides on the internet to make your digital photos look like they’ve been shot with a toy camera. There are also different programs for which this is the sole purpose – analogcolor is one which you simply drop and drag a photo and it messes up the colors, blurriness and puts vignettes on. Hipstamatic is of course one of the most popular of these on Iphones as it allows people to not have to carry around a camera with them, they have it already set in their phone.
So how is it that you can just tell it is digital rather than looking in the notes if it was taken with a digital camera or Iphone?
Noise is one key aspect, digital files create noise- the digital equivalent of film grain, when the colors are pushed or when vignettes are put on. Usually easier to see in a print or if the file is big up on the screen and also easy to see in darker areas of the photograph.

Some digital cameras even have settings on them so that you don’t need to do any editing to them to make them look like a pinhole for example. The colors are what to look out for here, un-film like shifts in color which don’t have the contrast of cross processing.

The hipstamatic images are possibly the hardest to be able to distinguish between. To me, they all look the same! The same random spot filter in the bottom left, the blurriness in the centre and the vignette’s clearly defined in the top right corner are the things to look out for oh and the border, the border is a dead give a away- see the two examples below.
Go with your gut! If you feel like it doesn’t have the right kind of film feeling to it, it probably doesn’t. If it looks too perfect, it probably is. and if in doubt, just ask, people don’t know what team you bat for!
written by erinwoodgatesphotography on 2011-03-17 #gear #tutorials #pinhole #vignette #camera #tutorial #tipster #noise #iphone #lomography #film-grain #hipstamatic #differentiate-analog-digital #analogcolor
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