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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

My daughter started asking to use my old digital cameras about 3 or 4 years ago, the ones from the early 2000s.

"Why would you want to use those?" I asked her. "Your phone's camera is way better."

She said she liked "the look" (of the photos) and mentioned that some people she followed on Instagram used them. Turns out there's a universe of retro photo accounts using film, old digital cameras, and old video cameras.

There are also accounts featuring resurrected media from those eras. It looks mundane to me, but triggers some fond nostalgia (see https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/style/art-school-instagra...) even for people who didn't live through those eras.

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It's weird to think that for people without clear memories of it, the 2000's might be imagined in the style of early digital photos the same way the 70's look like Super 8 footage or the early 20th century is sepia toned in my head.

Something that occurred to me the other day regarding my own "memories" of times before I was born:

From 1965–Present, the world is in color. The tone shifts a bit, but it's all in color.

1900–1964: Black and white. The world was actually black and white. Sometimes people moved around at a weird frame-rate :)

1800–1899: Color, but very much sepia toned. The whole world was slightly dirty and brownish, but the sky was still blue.

Big Bang–1799: Color, no sepia or nothing.

Of course this is all due to photography and movies. The general lack of both of those before the 20th Century (yeah, I know photography goes back further, but just barely. It wasn't widespread) means whatever images I get from that time period come from paintings and illustrations and written accounts. The sepia I perceive from the 1800s is basically thinking of them in terms of the railroads, westward expansion, etc.

So the result is that when I think about the Roman Empire—when was the last time you thought of that?—I see a richly-colored world like the one we have today. But when I think about WWII, it's all black and white. And the Civil War occurred in a vast, dusty, brownish field.

I have pretty much the same mental image, though with the 40's and 50's having some color probably mostly from period movies about that time.

What I really wonder is whether the photos and videos we're taking in the present will have some kind of subjective effect on how people remember our current time. It feels like we're finally at a point where most media has the fidelity to capture an objective image of the world, but that could just be that since we have the reference point of living through these times our minds can fill in the blanks.

Maybe the original comment I replied to's grandkid will want to borrow their old iPhone 12 to take retro pictures with someday.

I'm not sure a modern iPhone photo (say) is any more "objective" than a Kodachrome 64 slide, but there are sure going to be a lot more of them available!

I think there's a Calvin and Hobbes about this.

Its funny, because I agree with you mostly, but there are some very old colour photos and they really fuck with your brain.

I appoligize for the source, but if you scroll down hopefully you get what I mean https://www.boredpanda.com/first-color-photos-vintage-old-au....

The 3DS is getting a little resurgence for making weird pictures too. I've seen it at a bunch of concerts this year.

Back when lomo was popular (still got mine, somewhere) I played around with drilling a tiny hole in a film SLR body cap and turning it into a pinhole camera. That produced some fun results.

Reminds me of the 'lomography' fad of around 2009-2011, my younger self hankered after old cheap film cameras back then.

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