The vintage filters everyone is using: Huji Cam and1888
Jul 19, 2018
It seems like everyone has been populating their Instagram feeds with similar-looking photos recently. Vibrant, slightly distorted colors, blurred around the edges and a few light leaks—all the tell-tale retro characteristics of the beloved disposable camera (a device that I was convinced had long since lost its value). The photos are even complete with fluorescent date stamps. It could just be that your friends are all going out and buying disposable cameras to give their feeds a vintage aesthetic but it’s far more likely that they’ve all been using one of the many apps that have come out recently. The latest celebrity-endorsed trend is the disposable camera effect.
Huji Cam, the frontrunner in disposable camera emulation, is the ninth most popular photo and video app on the IOS app store, and has a 4.2/5 rating. People always talk about how film photography gives photos a unique character that is difficult to replicate with digital cameras, and now there’s a quick and easy way to recreate this effect. The developers of the Huji Cam app claim that their software allows you to make “your moments as precious as the feeling of analog film with old memories”.
Another app that very recently appeared on the scene (like, yesterday), is “1888”, an app that could be a real competitor to the more well-established “Huji Cam”. The name of the app is a nod to the year that Kodak was founded, and in a matter of hours the app has already placed #49 on the app store under photo and video. The design of the two apps is very similar. They both provide you with the same level of ‘disposable film’ effects that you’re going for, and both of them require you to pay a premium fee if you want to apply the effect to photos that you’ve already taken outside the app, US$0.99 on Huji Cam and US$1.99 on 1888.
Regardless of which application you end up downloading, it looks like the trend is here to stay. As if all your friends on Instagram weren’t enough, Selena Gomez and model Jasmine Sanders are also obsessed with these filters.
