Gorgeous Slow Camera Box Is Like an Analog Instagram

David McCourt's Slow Camera looks like a prop from 2001

David McCourt has come up with the idea of Slow Photography. Essentially, it’s a bulky, analog version of all the photo grungifying apps for the iPhone. The big difference, though, is that you’ll look way cooler when you’re doing it.

David’s Slow Camera is a box which treats your cellphone like a piece of film. You pull the front open like a drawer, slot in your phone and close the box back up. Now, you frame and view the image by peering into the top of the box, and select from three lenses by twisting a turret at the front. The camera itself looks like a prop from Kubrick’s 2001.

But why bother with all this extra trouble? After all, a cellphone camera’s greatest strength is its convenience. Because by slowing things down you have to take a more considered approach. If any of you has ever used a reflex camera with a top-down, reversed-image viewfinder, you’ll know just how much more attention it forces you to pay to composition.

The lenses are fun, too, and only add to the Hipstamatic-ness of the rig. You can choose between regular fixed, fisheye and macro lenses, and all of them deteriorate the quality of your pictures (see the results below).

I’m interested to see where this will end up. The current obsession with making perfect digital photos look like they were snapped with a plastic Soviet-era camera makes for some nice images, but it will start to look a little cheesy soon enough. Take a look at the 1980s fad for using tobacco grad filters and you’ll see how a certain look can date pictures strongly.

Pushing a camera to force weird images is as old as photography itself, though. I wonder if photographers will start to exploit digital noise and other defects the same way that film photographers exploited grain?

Slow Photography [David McCourt. Thanks, David!]

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