I love looking through my parent’s photo albums. My dad, like a lot of dads, looks absolutely absent from my childhood, but, in reality, he was always the one behind his Olympus 0M30 rather than in front of it. He wouldn’t call himself the most accomplished photographer, but what shines through in these 1980s era photos is the feeling of depth and narrative.
There’s a strong chance that I’m just being nostalgic and sentimental, but I’m fairly sure a lot of the feeling has to do with the colors. A lot of my childhood photos are either black and white or what I would describe as caramel looking. There’s a fair amount of chromatic aberration and halatian, and the black colors are over crushed. Looking at them fills me with that feeling of optimism and hope, almost like the world was a better place. I know that isn’t true, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling it.
In many ways, we’ve lost this. With copious numbers of photos snapped on our mobile phones every single day and very few of them ever making it into printed form, we’re becoming satisfied with below standard photos. They might communicate the facts, but they rarely move us. I have three children, and I’m forever taking snaps of them. The photos document their lives, but they don’t move me in the way traditional film does. I wanted to get this feeling back, and I’ve managed it, armed with a gorgeous little app called mood.camera.
mood.camera is available in the iOS store only for a free 7-day trial, after which you need to purchase the app to keep using it, starting from $4.99 / £4.99.
It’s new to the App Store and is, at the time of writing, only available for Apple users. The core of the creator’s vision is to recreate the look and feel of film, achieved by using a custom ProRAW (iPhone Pro 12 or newer) image processing pipeline that allows for a greater level of color grading than is ordinarily possible.
The app itself is incredibly simple. In fact, that’s one of the biggest selling points. The camera feed is restricted to a smaller part of the screen, which gives space for and clarity to all the buttons that provide functionality. This feed even has curved corners to give a feeling of film, and the interface colors are black and orange to make it feel retro.
Most of the nostalgia is created through the use of color emulations. You could call them filters, although the option to adjust the quality and tone of each gives a welcome level of customization that is absent on apps like Instagram.
With 15 to choose from, you’ll be sure to find a style that you just can’t put down. I have been transfixed by the Noir emulation with quality 400 and tone crush. My children have loved seeing themselves in black and white, and for me, it adds a depth of story to the photo. Maybe you’re shouting at the screen, “That’s all possible already. Just use a photo editing app.” I get that, but there’s something about having it in the app and it certainly helps that these emulations are so ridiculously gorgeous.
Another way that the app replicates the camera film experience is by not applying the emulation until after the photo has been taken. Depending on your age, you’ll remember the days of having to go to a shop to get your film developed. Between taking the photos and getting them developed, it might have been days or weeks. You had no idea whether you’d forgotten to take the lens cap off or not, and you just hoped the photos would turn out alright. The experience is not quite the same; you do, after all, only have to wait a matter of seconds to see the color adjusted result. But not being able to see it live in the camera feed creates a pleasing level of drama and anticipation.
This app has genuinely brought joy back into the process of taking photos on my phone. When I want to take a photo, I’m now engaging my creative juices to think about what look and feel I’m after rather than just capturing events so I have a record. I’m also taking fewer photos, but with more thought and a far better end quality. If you’ve lost your joie de vivre when it comes to capturing those special moments around you, why not give mood.camera a try?
Download mood.camera on iOS only.
