Mood camera
The other day, I learned about mood camera on Jasper's blog. In the last couple of days, I've been having a lot of fun with it.
There are a lot of camera apps the allow you to take photos with a retro filter or apply it afterwards, and I've like this a lot ever since I started using Instagram (back then it was iOS only and none of my real-life friends had ever heard about it). In the last couple of years I used VSCO a lot, but have grown somewhat tired of it recently.
Mood Camera change that. It's not because of the filters, though, but because of the random mode it offers. In random mode, the app will apply one filter at random after taking a picture. Like Jasper, I removed the black and white filters from the list of random filters because I don't really like how much it changes the characteristics of an image.
What has made this fun to shoot with the most in the past few days is my rule of taking a picture of a think only once. Sometimes the added filter is quite nice and its a great picture. Sometimes its completely off and the picture does not work at all. This is close to a film experience with a dramatically shorter feedback loop. I stick to my rule of not taking another shot if the first one didn't work very strictly. This kind of makes every picture a small exercise of letting go and accepting that I cannot take a shot of everything.
While writing this post, I checked the app's website for the first time, where the author shares some guiding principles he followed while building the app. One of those reads
Encourage users to embrace uncertainty and lack of control, instead of obsessing over the perfect edit. This freedom from the pressure to produce flawless images, allows the photographer to rediscover the simple pleasure of taking photos.
The app definitely achieves that for me.
