Losing battle, fought and lost.

That Hipstamatic App. Over the past couple of months, more and more of my friends have been posting photos from this app and they've kinda been grating on me a bit. I don't know why this is, it's more of a reflex than anything. I guess, being a bit of a purist with everything I try, it makes me sad to see such a beautiful artform distilled to an iPhone app and consumed by people who don't really appreciate it. I've got to stop being like this - it's great that people take photos loads now, and the voyeur in me enjoys looking at all of them really.

So, why have I now decided to try this app-I-once-hated? I've been lusting after something a little more organic, photographically, for a while. I really want the purely mechanical Nikon FE and the beautiful Polaroid SX70, but it's impossible to find 35mm film that doesn't contain the ground bones of dead animals, and that Polaroid is such an expensive habit that I don't think I can justify it. At least not now.

The problem with the above is that the camera porn is a pretty substantial part of the battle. I mean, look at that FE. So industrial. You could beat someone to death with it, load some film and shoot away and it wouldn't even know the horrors of its past. Without wanting to sound like I'm 90 years old, they just don't make 'em like that any more. And the SX70 is a gorgeous piece of kit, lovingly restored by actual Polaroid engineers - what camera/gadget nut wouldn't swoon over it?!

The major aspect, of course, is results. Analogue photography has a certain way about it. I see a lot of people on flickr emulating the way film looks, and they do a great job, but I don't like to change things. If a photo comes out of a camera with perfect colour representation, I don't like changing that. If I accidentally screw the white balance or the focus is way out, I usually quite like that. It seems organic (well, as organic as a digital photograph can be). So playing with the sliders on a digital photo to make it look more film'y just doesn't compute (awful, awful pun). Shame. With the iPhone 4 camera being the great quality it is, I'm going to start trying some of these kooky photo apps to try and fill the void of the film cameras I lust after. It probably won't work, but I feel like I have to try it. This is the first thing in four-ish years that I feel like I'm missing out on, being vegetarian, but I just can't bend my own rules to justify it.

So far, I've bought IncrediBooth, Camera+ and Hipstamatic (the latter needing an update to really bring it in line with the 4's capabilities). What else do I need?

Before anyone points out that jelly uses ground animal bones, these little pots don't. The only one that isn't veggie friendly is the red one, because of the food colouring. So there