Old-School Instagram Filters / 1000memories

Remember when we used film in our cameras? Do you recall how rich those printed images and developed photographs could be? The highly popular smartphone app, Instagram, has done a marvelous job of introducing a series of filters that you can apply to your digital snapshots to give ’em that nostalgic, stylized, artistic feel. No more hassling with Photoshop, now anyone can look like Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, or Terry Richardson.

Old photo, memories, and scrapbooking website, 1000memories, has taken a look at each Instagram filter and attempted to correlate the actual real-world camera and film that inspired each vintage effect.

At 1000memories, we have a particular fondness for old stuff (if you can’t tell by our homepage). That’s why we’ve always liked Instagram. It celebrates the old, vintage aesthetic of the film photos of yore. But there’s a lot of history behind the photo filter that many folks are not aware of—in fact, none of the photo apps you know today would exist without the vintage photography that inspired them. So we set out to hack the formula to recreate the look of the analog Instagram filters using the technology that inspired them in the first place—vintage cameras and film.

Be sure to check out their blog entry for an in-depth explanation of how they came to their photographic findings. Here’s their great graphic in high resolution, link here.