Hey all, Erik here with a quick guest post about a subject that’s raised a lively debate in our studio. Everyone on our crew has long been shooting with Polaroids, rangefinders, micro 4/3 cameras adapted to accept vintage lenses…even processing digital images to look like they came out of an old dusty camera. Surveying the landscape, it’s clear this tide has been rising for a while now and we’re not the only ones attached to this stuff. So the question I present to you is this:
Why is retro or faux-retro photography so popular these days?
Why, when we have such capable and inexpensive cameras at our disposal, are we reverting to old technology and old aesthetics? Is it pure nostalgia? Is it a palette cleanser from the ease and accuracy of said capable and inexpensive cameras? Is it a passing trend? We have opinions–especially Chase does as you might expect–but we’d like to hear from you.
When you’re tweaking your exposure and focusing manually with your eyeball mk I, you tend to appreciate the results of your photos more than you would with digital.
It’s because that’s what we grew up seeing.
The high-end/high-quality look has always been around, but only has it become affordable.
Back when I was growing up, all we had was a Polaroid camera and the disposable 35mm cameras from CVS.
Now that everyone has 10+ megapixels in their pocket, outputting things that don’t look super clean is one of the more popular ways of standing out from the crowd.
Basically, it’s because not everyone does it, so it’s cool to do it.
In my opinion, there’s something about that retro look, washed out greens, gritty lens flare, scratches, low contrast, that creates a mysterious edge within the photo. Some of us are thrown back to our childhood photos and simpler times; some of the treatments remind us of the romantic photos of our parents and grandparents.
I find the greatest part about being a photographer is the freedom to find, and sometimes create, the mystery and romance in each image I produce. It is my job to see the absolute best in people and magnify that. My goal with each photo is to make an image that someone will look at for more than five minutes and hopefully will look at more than once. That retro look is an easy way to inject that kind of mystery and interest into an otherwise regular photo. But we must always be careful about overusing a treatment just because it works.
I’ve returned almost exclusively to film and I’ll never regret it.
I think it’s the same debate than CD vs. vinyl. Modern cameras give so HD than it look better than true, but it make it cold, as for vinyl, old camera make images warmer. Even myself, I have all the retro apps on my iphone, lemeleme, hipstomatic….. and retouched some of my pictures, 2 years ago bought my Holga and lately, bought a Yashica and a ser of 2 Canon AE-1. The other week, I meet Bernard Brault (famous Canadian news/sports photographer) while I was picking up a print from a 35mm Tri-X, and this Pro, who’s been shooting for the last 3-4 decades, asked me why do you bother taking vintages while you can do the same with photoshop.!? I answered this: same as when I ski, sometime I take old non parabolic skis: with vintages I have to think at what I’m doing before I shoot, technically, and the subject.