Is The Impossible Project just that?

I’ve been into anlalogue photography for the last year or so, messing around with a Holga, Diana F+ and more recently a Seagull and Lubitel.  I think the charm’s in the unpredictability of using the cameras, and also in the way each distorts the image (the latter two cameras do this a bit less than the former two).

An aspect of analogue photography that has pretty much disappeared now is instant film.  Polaroid used to produce this, but stopped in 2008 because few people were buying it.

But there’s still a stalwart group of Polaroid users.  532,550 images on Flickr are tagged “Polaroid” (though I’d imagine quite a few of those are faux-polaroids) and the main Polaroid group has just under 14,000 members and over 150,000 images in its pool.

A group of Polaroid photographers have taken it upon themselves to resurrect the production of instant film; The Impossible Project are setting about restarting the manufacture of new types of instant film in a factory in the Netherlands.

However, production seems to have hit a snag, and “an unexpected surprise of impossibility within production occured on the weekend of February 6th”.  The Impossible Project haven’t really said much more than that, apart from moving their press conference announcing their product launch back to the tail-end of March.

So, will instant film be available again soon, or will we start to see analogue photography fade away?

I took this.  Down the Social with the Diana and a fisheye lense.

Get your photos on Getty

I’m enjoying the ads on Vice at the moment.

They’ve had some really good photo-related campaigns recently, and I thougth I’d start with the Olympus Stories of the Eye.  For this campaign, Alice Dellal, Lovefoxxx, Miquita Oliver and Daisy Lowe were given a PEN camera to capture their daily lives.  Also, Vice users were invited to submit their images for the scenesters to pick their favourites.

It is/was a partnership, so it sits up there on Vice and is pretty cool.

A more recent campaign I’ve seen on Vice is Getty Image’s lost/found where you make a Flickr set of 10 images, and ping it over to Getty.  They have a look, and if they like it, they’ll add it to their library.  Presumably they’ll then sort out licensing with you and ask what control you want over your work.

What I like about lost/found is that it gives you a way of getting your images onto Getty (beyond the usual review process), whilst creating a feed of the submissions.  Unfortunately, the Getty photo pool on Flickr is disabled.  Surely this would be a great way of getting the images together and creating a focus for the campaign.

Nevermind.

In both cases, what works about the campaigns is that they’re using an existing site and inviting users to take part, rather than creating something new and driving traffic to it.  They also give something of value; for Olympus it’s entertainment from relevant celebs, whilst for Getty it’s the chance for photographers to distribute their work and get paid for it.

image CC – LeatherHeart on Flickr

Get snapped by the Sartorialist!

The Sartorialist is one of the most famous bloggers out there. He has an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time – camera poised to take exquisite street-style photographs.

He’s one of the most re-blogged bloggers in ‘the sphere’, a staple source for fashion writers worldwide. If you are able to grace his URLs you too could secure your place in style history.

Here’s how you do it:

Oh Snap! via Notcot

happy monday

This typeface was created out of over 5000 hand cut matchsticks for a project called “Things that I have learned in my life so far”. If the lesson hadn’t been learned before production began, I imagine New York School of Arts student Steve Haslip, had a good understanding of what time of day he was most effective after the ‘few hundred hours’ of whittling and gluing.

Happy Monday morning everyone.

via typography served