Confused by a surfeit of options? Here's some help with Hipstamatic!

Hipstamatic’s app icon

I’ve had an iPhone for a little over a year now, and one of my biggest weaknesses where apps are concerned is photography-related apps. One of the most popular photography apps is Hipstamatic. The app offers users a selection of “films,” “lenses,” and flash effects which they can mix and match as they choose. Each film, lens, or flash effect changes the look of the photo, usually by adding filters that mimic the look of photographs from bygone decades or the lomography photos of today. Many also add fake light leaks or blurs. A few of the “film” options only add borders, but most involve some kind of filter as well. The end result is a square, generally retro-looking photo suitable for even the most ambivalent hipster. (And, apparently, also suitable for the New York Times, as in 2010 photographer Damon Winter used a photo he took using the app for a front-page story about the war in Afghanistan.)

The downside to Hipstamatic – which frankly has often left me sticking with the built-in camera app and then using Instagram/Diptic/other photo-editing apps to achieve a more edited look – is that the wide array of lenses, films, and flash effects means that there are a dizzying number of combinations possible, not all of which will produce the kind of picture you’re going for. Some films might work incredibly well with some lenses but poorly with others; some films might work reasonably well with all of them. Bringing the various flash effects into the mix only exacerbates the situation.

Even if one hasn’t purchased any of the additional “HipstaPaks” (which usually contain at least one film and one lens, and sometimes will also include flash effects or “skins” which modify the appearance of the app itself), Hipstamatic still automatically provides the user with five lenses, four films, and three flashes. That’s a reasonably wide array of choices in and of itself. I haven’t even purchased all of the expansion packs, but I still have quite a few more of all of those categories.

Turns out that there are people out there, far more intrepid than me, who have painstakingly created guides (of varying thoroughness) to what happens when you use a given lens with a given film and a given flash. Here there are, in ascending order of usefulness as perceived by me (your milage may vary).

Taken by Victoria Stiegel using Hipstamatic

First of all, there’s always Hipstamatic’s Hipstamatic Field Guide. It has the advantage of being run by the actual folks responsible for Hipstamatic and is therefore probably always the most up-to-date resource available. However, its usefulness extends mostly just to describing individual films/lenses/etc. It does not spell out or explicitly illustrate what happens when you mix them all up, although the descriptions of the gear do generally contain some suggested uses.

And now, on to the not-so-official guides…

Photojojo’s Ultimate Hipstamatic Guide
This guide, put together by the fine folks at Photojojo (if you consider yourself to be any kind of photographer, hobbyist or more official, you need to check out their store, it is amazing and they aren’t even paying me to say that), was published in April 2010 and thus lacks examples for the gear released by Hipstamatic since then. It is still plenty useful, however. It consists of Flickr photo sets organized according to film type and flash type. Each photo set is preceded by bullet-pointed information about the film or flash – what kind of effects it produces and which lenses Photojojo thinks it works best with. As you flip through the photos in each set, if you find one that strikes your fancy, you can click through to the Flickr page for that photo, where you will find the details regarding which lens, film, and flash (if any) were used for that particular image.

The Hipstamatic Combination Chart by Mark Bruce
I like this one more than the Photojojo guide because it’s more immediately visual as well as dating from a year later than the Photojojo post, and thus being that much more complete. Photographer Mark Bruce spent literally an entire day taking the same picture (of R2-D2, as you do) over and over, using each lens with each kind of film and each flash option. He then created handy-dandy charts (based on which lens is being used) that put all the different film and flash options next to each other, so with one glance you can see if any of the combinations are what you’re looking for. At the time he created these charts, there were thirteen lenses available.

Taken by Victoria Stiegel using Hipstamatic

Hipstamatrix
This is the most up-to-date guide I have found thus far, combining 18 films and 21 lenses, which is relatively close to where the app is now. It’s also possibly the most fun. By choosing characteristics of your desired finished product (warm or cool colors, dark or light borders, contrast and saturation levels, etc), you end up with a selection of photos examples matching your criteria. The more choices you make, the more you narrow down your results. Once you see a photo you like, you can then click on it to find out which film/lens combination was used to create it. Helpfully, the names of the films and lenses are linked to their entries in the Hipstamatic Field Guide, so if you want further information about any of your choices.

Personally, I think I’ll spend some time looking over these charts and testing the results and hopefully will get more use out of the app because of it. Of course, nothing is as good as actually playing around more with the app, preferably in situations when I’m not thinking “I need to take a picture of this right now,” so that I can actually leisurely fiddle with all my options. I hope y’all will find these links as useful as I think I’m going to. Happy photographing!