Low fidelity photography has a great power to turn even the most simple of photos into a statement of a certain kind bearing the inexplicable sentiment of a family photo from 1987. These are 9 Instances of Lo-Fi Photography at its greatest.
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The title above is not there without its reason. For almost a decade, lo-fi aesthetics have been celebrated not only in the nostalgy-driven indie culture, but have also successfully found their way into a widespread mainstream acceptance. Today, this might as well be a still shot from the music video for the next single by Lana Del Ray. A desolate Californian shore during the early springtime where a young, vulnerable heart writes her diary with the help of a Polaroid camera. The old piles are stuck there like some ill-placed colossi, never to serve as a fundament for another pier. All of this abstracts from the fact that the rich but somehow toned-down color palette makes this lo-fi photography an almost painting-like experience.
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The truth is that our lives are made of constant departures and sweet reunions. Some hurt big time, others are more or less temporary. This example of lo-fi photography has millions of stories within it. This couplet of airplanes might carry two hearts, each being fond of the other, each taking off into a different direction. The sun is up, but the gray shade of the upper-right cloud lining infuses a sense of foreboding. It is like one of those spiritually subdued days when a loud joke falls flat even if you try. Something is about to be gone and the next meet-up is so far away. Other than that, it’s a great example of a lo-fi photo made from a regular photograph. Get the old film texture and blend it together with your image for a similar effect!
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Being awake during the wee hours of the morning is always a surreal experience. Just toss in a terrain of misty mountains, a distant herd, and an ethereal figure giving a penetrative gaze above her shoulder in the foreground. This is an indie daydream that shows how easily a lo-fi photography can beat the regular photo creations in practically every discipline. The diminished ocher of the sky is so full of youthful promise while the deep green of the meadow sets in a mood that grasps one’s emotion and twists it only to leave the poor soul completely armless against the feeling. We live to take summer morning photos like this, and thank your lucky stars that somebody already did.
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Okay, obviously more than any other photo on this list, this one is more of a lo-fi stylization. Still, it bears the feeling and might as well be taken by your 4-year-old self in 1993 of the one-story house you used to live in with an improvised skate park nearby. The vibrant orange and yellow marks the best of summer evenings while the distance from the author and the photo subject gives the sense of something that’s overpast. We’ll save up another wistful narration here. This simply begs for the echoed unison of another reverb-laden indie anthem dedicated to the beauty of the time gone by. Where’s Arcade Fire when you need them…
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Is there any living soul that would not want a visual sensation like this as their property? If there is anything that gets one started, keeps one going and makes one longing, then it’s the explosive beauty of a volatile summer sky. Beware, for the best of experiences usually have a spectacle like this going on in the background. Now about the technical specifications- this particular lo-fi photography was shot with an iPhone and edited with the most simple of presets available on numerous photo editing apps. So, can you repeat it? Sure you can, and for sure, you should. The photo set is about 197 million square miles wide while you have about 90 days to perfect the composition. That is the surface area of our planet and the length of the summer.
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One might easily give up on this lo-fi photography, basing his decision on the fact that the picture’s resolution does not contribute a lot to making things any clearer for the viewer. However, this is one of the photos selected for the aforementioned 2016 International Krappy Kamera Competition and rightly so. The cool and coarse coastal wind fluttering the Ammophila (beachgrass) in the late, presumably autumn evening could never look better than here. A high definition shot would simply give up too much while a bluish dream-like scenery like this makes the thing chilly romantic and alluring. Day or night, the seaside is always a great mystique.
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The scenery here is completely ambiguous. Nothing is indicated except for the leafless trees suitable for two different seasons. The lights are on, and the abject street is revived by a group of people, probably a family. Yet the feeling is so inexplicably dim and cheerless, one could swear this is a sad conclusion to a string of unlucky events. Even more so, the staging is so Eastern European-like, that it might get into the territory of tragedy depending on which region we’re dealing with here. Then again, it is also a beautiful lo-fi photo. The contrast is nebulous, once again providing a sense of a fading memory, something our mind can vaguely recollect when encountering a particular smell, a particular sound, and... a particular photo.
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The title, sounding peculiarly like a default name for an impressionist’s painting, is an interesting coincidence for the imagery itself has the Impressionism written all over it. There are five layers across the canvas filled up with rough strokes of pixels. The central figure is very approximate, conveying only a notion of what we see standing there in the shallow coastline. The aspect that turns this lo-fi photo into a still unrecognized piece of art is the bright red burn effect on the left. In that respect, the photo seems almost too good to be unintentional. Even more, take into account that this could be any of us photographed by our parents during the most exciting years of our lives.
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As hazy and indistinct as this list is as a whole, we’re summing up with a lo-fi photograph that still doesn’t tell much while having a wonderful conclusional tone as we see an angelic figure disappearing into a sunlit vast. Might be an infinity, might be the world of grown-ups, might be every new phase of life we will encounter. Lo-fi is not only a hot topic in the world of Instagram and the ever-expanding hipster circles. It’s a visual medium capable of adding something you never knew your photo possessed before, an effective way of getting out the raw emotion. And isn’t that what photography should do at its best?
