Hipstamatic is a digital photography application for the Apple iPhone. It uses the iPhone's camera to allow the user to shoot square photographs, to which it applies a number of software filters in order to make the images look as though they were taken with an antique film camera. The user can choose among a number of effects which are presented in the application as "lenses", "films" and "flashes". Several of these are included with the application, while others need to be purchased separately.
Hipstamatic is part of a "retro" trend in photography, which has seen a rise in the popularity of cheap and technically obsolete analog cameras (such as Lomography and Polaroid instant cameras), as well as software filters and smartphone software that emulate such cameras. Other "vintage" photography applications include CameraBag and Instagram. Like Hipstamatic, they often include social networking features to facilitate the exchange of photos via the internet.[1][2]
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The application's styling is based on what its creators claim was the Hipstamatic 100, a cheap plastic analog photographic camera. According to Synthetic, the company distributing Hipstamatic, that camera was developed in the early 1980s by Bruce and Winston Dorbowski, but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 200 units.[3]
Reporting on the application for pocket-lint.com, Libby Plummer remarked that the story of the plastic Hipstamatic 100 may well be viral advertising, because she was unable to find any internet sources confirming the existence of this camera apart from material written by Synthetic.[4]
In December 2010, the Wausau City Pages newspaper of Wausau, Wisconsin reported that the story "appears to be a myth", as reporters were unable to verify any part of the story of the Dorbowski brothers in local records.[5][6]
The application has enjoyed substantially more success than its purported plastic predecessor, selling 1.4 million times as of November 2010.[4] It received additional publicity when New York Times photographer Damon Winter used it in 2010 to illustrate a front-page story about the Afghanistan War.[7] Winter's images gained recognition by receiving third place in the Pictures of the Year International photojournalism competition. [8]