A photo filter is like a good screwdriver; a reliable, efficient, easy-to-use tool. But put in the wrong hands it’s potentially lethal.

Wells Baum on Instagram filters:

I stopped using Instagram filters almost two years ago. You don’t need them. The snap should be able to speak for itself, in its raw untouched nature.

But I do believe that some images still need a little pop. And that’s when you should use the VSCO app, Litely, or Snapseed, whichever apps enable you to adjust the strength of filters without making the photo look fake.
This is partially true. Instagram filters can be heavy-handed. I, like Baum, have not used them in a while. I exclusively retouch photos in the VSCOcam app on my iPhone. Like Instagram, it has preset filters. Unlike Instagram, it let’s you decide how much of a filter you want to use (on a 0-10 slider).
There are many philosophies on photography and many different industries in which photography is used, but there’s many professional photographers who don’t let their photographs leave the studio until they’ve been retouched. Annie Liebovitz used to work with one of the masters of retouching—Pascal Dangin—often referred to as the ‘Photo Whisperer’ (It looks as though Liebovitz now works with Alexander Verhave).
Even before the days of Photoshop, photographers like Richard Avedon were obsessive about tweaking their photos (through the old school process of burning-and-dodging).
Here’s one of his marked up photos:

The fact that #nofilter is one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram means shit to me and has no correlation to how good a photograph is (because most people are bad photographers).
Sometimes I get out of bed and I look fucking amazing, but more often than not, I need to brush my hair and put on a nice, clean, matching outfit. Photographs are no different. In the absence of the time and means to retouch my iPhone photos in Photoshop on my Powerbook, I use the VSCO app to tighten up my images.
Sure, sometimes the light is right, your timing is perfect and you don’t need to monkey with your shot but most photographs can be improved. The key to retouching photos is if someone looks at your photograph and their first thought is, “That’s a great photograph.” NOT, “Oh, he used the Mayfair filter.”
Photo filters bring to mind a quote a friend from design school told me:
“Helvetica is like a good screwdriver; a reliable, efficient, easy-to-use tool. But put in the wrong hands & it’s potentially lethal.”
—T. Geismar
You can find me here on Instagram.

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Photography

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Photo Booths Rock

Awesome exhibit of photo booth images at my alma mater, Rutgers (via Junk Culture):

He likely hailed from the Midwest, sometimes sported a fedora and smoked a pipe. He dressed in casual plaids or in a suit. His demeanor ranged from jovial to pensive. His hair evolved from thick black to a thinning white widow’s peak. And sometimes, a “Seasons Greetings” sign hung over his head.

We might know a lot about how this man aged, but what we don’t know is his identity or why he took – and saved – more than 450 images of himself in a photobooth over the course of several decades.

My friends know I have an addiction to photo booths. I’m talking about the real ones, with smelly emulsion and fixer (exhibits A and B to name a few).

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Photography

Goodbye, Cameras

Craig Mod says goodbye to cameras in his New Yorker piece, and reflects on his love of film photography:

In late 2004, after graduating college, I scrounged together enough cash to buy my first real digital camera: the Nikon D70, which was almost identical to the 8008 except that, when the shutter opened, light hit an array of sensors rather than film. Even though that difference seemed small, the purchase made me nervous. I had developed hundreds, if not thousands, of rolls of black-and-white film in my badly ventilated, chemical-filled university apartment. Would I miss watching ghostly images appear from the silver halide salts, the sting of acetic acid on my hands and in my nostrils?

I stopped using film almost immediately. The benefits were too undeniable: results were immediately visible on the camera’s rear screen, and I could snap thousands of photos on a trip without worrying about fragile rolls of film, which were always an X-ray machine away from erasure. But the D70 was unromantic. It didn’t have the strangely alluring mechanical rawness of the 500C, while the shift to digital imaging disrupted the compartmentalized, meditative processes that had punctuated photography for the previous hundred and fifty years: shooting, developing, and printing. As anyone working in a creative field knows, the perspective gained by spending time away from work is invaluable. Before digital (and outside of Polaroids), photography was filled with such forced perspective. No matter how quickly you worked, it was common for hours–if not days, weeks, or longer–to pass between seeing the image through the viewfinder and reviewing it in the darkroom. Digital technology scrunches these slow, drawn-out processes together.
via Drewbot

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Photography

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Don’t Wait For Perfect

The Most Fascinating Humans In New York, Collected In One Place:

At 21 years old, Brandon Stanton—the creative force behind the immensely popular photo blog Humans of New York—had flunked out of college (earning a combined score of zero on his five courses). Kicked out of his parent’s home, he was doing drugs, working at a dead end job at Applebee’s and living in his grandparent’s basement in Atlanta, Georgia. He was also convinced that he was going to write a bestseller.
I love stories like this—taking a hobby, a passion, a side project and turning it into much more than than what it might seem like at first glance.

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Photography

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