faking it

There was an article this weekend in the New York Times about how point-and-shoot cameras are becoming rarer and rarer as cell phone cameras become more capacious in their mega-pixel count, and more versatile in the applications that allow one to play around with the images.   I still carry my point and shoot with me pretty much everywhere: it has a decent lens - far better than my iPhone 4 - and an adequate zoom, and it's image stabilised - and of course stable enough itself to rest on a flat surface for a very long exposure.   But no, it doesn't have apps - despite all the twiddling one can do in Photoshop to create just about anything.   I've long been a fan of iPhone apps - ShakeItPhoto, which mimics the Polaroid - the old Polaroid; CameraBag, Cool fx, Hipstamatic, Photo fx, TiltShiftGen, Toy Camera ... and this article mentioned another one: Old Camera.  

Yes!   This allows one to choose from a range of "old" styles - Rich B&W, HiCon B&W, Silver, Platinum, Kallitype (with which I was playing around when I took my current FB status pic), and this, Cyanotype (and then one can choose Vignetting, or not; Square Mode, or not, and one's favored image size).   I find it strikingly good as mimicry.   It also gives extraordinary grandeur to the view from my office window: this looks like a piece of civic pride from the mid C19th, when in fact it's a particularly rowdy and crumbling frat house.   Maybe Rutgers should use this photo app for some of their on-line publicity photos?   It would match the aesthetics of the black and white celebrity endorsements that have appeared as commercials in this season's football games (probably more of an inducement than the play on the field), which have Junot Diaz and some other luminaries singing the praises of their Alma Mater.   I'll be trying out some of the other modes to see if they might, indeed, turn the back streets of the College Avenue Campus into a thing of surprising beauty.