A Year of #nofilter Moments

We don’t get to relive or redo moments, feelings, thoughts, emotions. We don’t get to edit or filter them, and if we stage them repeatedly then they never turn out the same the second or third time. 

They happen once and then they are done and gone and have changed from a  moment into a memory. Maybe we will romanticise, sanitise or believe that we were prettier than we were when we recall those memories, but the reality of the moment is something we can’t and shouldn’t want to change. 

With that in mind we have decided to do a little project. Every day for a year we will take one photo, one simple instant photo with a Polaroid camera. We will click the red button and wait and wonder for fifteen minutes while an image develops. We won’t edit it or photoshop it, it will remain a single unfiltered analogue image that will capture one moment in time for each day.

It will be a 8ish by 7.5ish centimetre snapshot. We may look happy, we may look sad (we may be happy or sad), it might be blurry, out of focus, the colours may not be quite the way they look in reality (but we all see things differently anyway, surely?), but it will be true.

Then when we have taken these beautiful flawed analogue images, we are going to take a digital photo of them and upload them to instagram, which may seem a little ironic, but it’s the best way we have to share. 

We will keep updating this post with a few of our favourites, and you can follow our instagram page to see them all!

Day 1 – The moment that we discover that we know nothing about distance from subject, lighting, focus and then we take a bad digital picture of our not great analogue picture. We love it!

Day 2 – Proper colours (mostly). Shame about the bit of grass at the front of the shot, but it felt like this was going to all be easy…

Day 3 – We (unintentionally) discover how to take an almost sepia photo with colour film and no filters.

Day 6 – We learn that there is a darken switch for a reason.

Day 7 – We pick potatoes and take a photo that somehow seems to have existed for decades longer than either of us have. 

Day 8 – A surprisingly natural composition – this is who we are. 

Day 11 – Because bathrooms are always great places to take pictures. 

Day 12 – We discovered that the temperature of the photo as it develops affects the colour balance. Warm colours in a warm corn field.

Day 14 – Our first attempt with black and white film – through a car window in the sun, it’s a bit strange but we like it!

4 thoughts on “A Year of #nofilter Moments”

  1. What a lovely project guys! I have many of these moments with my family, in the old pictures of our family’s life while growing up. The imperfections and the “ugliness” are indeed the real beauty and still today we cherish them.

    Reply
  2. Wow, this is very cool – is it easy to get film for these cameras now?

    Looking forward to following and seeing how the pictures end up, no disasters so far!

    Reply
    • It’s pretty easy to get the film in any bigger city with a decent camera shop or order it online, but it’s quite expensive.

      If you don’t know the story of the Impossible Project, how they started remaking instant cameras and ‘Polaroid’ film after Polaroid had stopped and then later bought the Polaroid trademark and created the OneStep-2 then Google it, it’s pretty cool.

      No disasters so far, but I’m sure there will be some along the way, fantastic disasters!

      Reply

Leave a Reply to John Cancel reply