A Lens into the Soul
lensed
The new Tintype SnapPak brings the look and feel of daguerreotype and tintype photography to Hipstamatic, with soul-capturing results. To learn more about the Pak, we talked with Hipstamatic co-founder Ryan Dorshorst, and Creative Director Aravind Kaimal, who give us the inside scoop on the inspiration and creative process behind this unique combo.
What was the inspiration behind the tINtYPe lens? The team has been obsessed over the last few months with tintype photography, so Aravind (our creative director) and I tried to figure out how we could bring it to Hipstamatic.
tINtYPe photos have such a specific LOOK—how were you able to recreate that?
Some of the key components with tintypes are extremely shallow depth of field as well as an eerie and surreal focus on the eyes. We’ve written some pretty complex processing for the lens and films, and are using Apple’s ios’s face detection technology in order to create this very specific focus on the face and eyes (though it also works great when shooting things other than people). This is all part of the new Tinto 1884 lens.
Let’s talk about the films—there’s a black and white and color. How did you create those?
For the films, we were specifically inspired by the rich black and whites of daguerreotypes and also the tradition of hand-painted photos that was common before color photography was more prevalent and economical. From this inspiration, we built the D-Type Plate film, which is the black and white film, and the C-Type Plate film, is the color.
So where does this lens and com-bo stack up against all of hipsta-matic’s other releases?
We tested the Tintype SnapPak for several weeks, and it’s definitely one of our favorite Paks we’ve ever created. The photos have a truly soul-capturing effect, and the look and feel is like nothing we’ve ever done. We’ve already seen some of the amazing ways our community is us-ing the Pak, and as always, we’re floored by their talent and creativity. It definitely feels like it’s one of our community’s favorite combos as well.—MS
