The Hipstamatic, contrary to its name, isn’t a camera to be used whilst wearing tight pants, showing your underwear and doing elephant trunk skids on your fixed-gear track bike. Instead, it is an iPhone application which will apply all manner of image degrading, film-like effects to your pictures.
Hipstamatic is certainly not the only Lomo-fication application in the iTunes Store, but it is notable for its wonderful interface, which lets you choose from various films, add flash-gel effects and swap “lenses”. For instance, swapping lenses is done by swiping across the front of the camera body, and changing films is achieved by flipping the on-screen camera open and choosing which one to use. Thankfully the visual metaphor doesn’t continue as far as making you engage the sprocket-holes. When you are all set, you flip the camera back around and view the action through a tiny, low-contrast, on-screen “viewfinder”.
The app itself comes in at $2, and further effects packs can be bought from within. The Williamsburg (ho ho) pack, for example, comes with a Helga Viking lens, Pistil film and a three-pack of gels (shouldn’t that be a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon?) These bad puns are to be found throughout Hipstamatic, and spotting them is part of the fun.
Perhaps I will give this to myself as an early Christmas gift, to remind me of the plastic-lensed, light leaking camera that was part of the Starsky and Hutch kit I got for Christmas so many years ago.
Hipstamatic Application [Hipstamatic]
