For many years, we have been making better cameras.

Like, waaaaay better. In your phone.

My first digital camera was a 2.1 megapixel, four-AA-battery, HP-branded behemoth. You could have smashed a badger to death with it with enough run-up.

Bought another one later on about two years later. Two AA batteries. 3-point-something megapixels.

And they were all right. Not great, but all right.

Now? Now, I have a better camera in my fucking phone than I ever had drawing 6 volts in my bag giving me a hernia.

Then what?

What do we do with these fantastically fucking fabulous cameras?

We take the shittiest, loest-fi photos. We deliberately fuck up deliciously clear and crisp acquisitions and slawm a load of piece-o-shittifying filters (or make it look like a Polaroid, only much, much worse).

Why?

Clearly, photography is the only field in which technology is getting better, but the pushback from existing (and in some cases new) proponents is increasing in proportion.

No-one takes a brand new car and fucks with the air filters and the carburettor and the catalytic “to make it sound more authentic”.

The pioneers of photography would be smashing our fucking faces in if they could see what we had, and more importantly, what we were dicking about doing with it. They craved the kind of quality and clarity that we have now.

And we take off-colour, overprocessed pictures of our goddamn cats.

Thought experiment: Define what about digital photography is too convenient and remove that aspect.

Postulate: Today’s users crave the feel of analogue film cameras.

OK. So how about this then?

• Make an app for any and all smartphones (what do I care, anyway?) that has no live preview, just a tiny tiny viewfinder with deliberate parallax introduced into its calibration.
• When the photo is taken, snap the shutter closed, don’t allow any post-processing and stop working when the buffer reaches 24 or 36 photos (the 36 option could be an in-app purchase).
• When the buffer reaches the maximum, prevent the user from taking any more photos for about three days, to accurately simulate the “authenticity” of sending the film roll to the lab, unless they buy a second roll.
• Send the user their photos (by email, I guess. Ugh. *eyeroll*) in one big batch, with some randomly introduced errors (or an unremovable “overexposed” or “underexposed” sticker on the good photos).
• Charge them for each time they fill the buffer and for each time they want their photos again (a “reprint”).
• *some scenes missing*
• Watch the money roll in, or, more likely, watch people fall back to the default camera app that came with the fucking thing and save a shit-ton of money.

Honestly, this is a terrible idea for an app, and it undermines everything about digital photography that we hold dear.

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you. Turn off the filters. Corrections, yes. Red-eye, yes. White point, yes.

But every time you put a bokeh or anything else on your photo to “make it better”, David Bailey pisses a bullet.