About

(Just in case you don’t read all the way to the bottom just a quick note – all the images on this site are photographs I have taken and all rights reserved, please don’t use them without asking first. If you would like to use them for anything just drop me an email at cat007ster@gmail.com thank you.)

So, honest answer – how many photo apps have you got on your phone?

Next Question – how many of them do you use, really use? All the features, all the filters, the custom settings, the tricky bits, the whole app?

I’ve got loads of apps, and I’ve already deleted a few I never used, I’m left with the ones I use often but I still don’t use all the filters, all the lenses, all the options. It’s almost impossible to use every app you have to it’s full capacity, there are so many and they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

For so many people (me included, no matter how many DSLR’s or film cameras I have – and I have quite a few) our phone is our main camera. It’s with us every day and makes it so easy to take photographs of every day life, the moments we would never have recorded if we were still reliant on remembering to have a camera with us 24/7 and trying to find a way to carry the unwieldy ‘real’ cameras that some of still love.

I started using Oggl a few years ago, an offshoot of Hipstamatic. The promise of a new lens and film every month for a small, yearly, subscription got the better of me and I signed up. I preferred it to the original Hipstamatic at first, I liked the ability to edit photo’s from your photo album later rather than have to decide on the filter/film combination when you took the photo or rely on the random setting that came with a shake of your phone with Hipstamatic.

Recently Oggl has been unreliable, the updates are sporadic and often late and it’s no longer available in the UK App store which leads me to think it’s no longer going to be supported (and my contact with Hipstamatic support seems testimony to that) so I switched back to Hipstamatic. The Hipstamatic team were great and gave me voucher codes so I could get most of the packs that I had on Oggl onto my Hipstamatic account so I thought it was only fair to make the most of it.

I decided that I’d set myself a quest (I do like a photo quest/list/challenge) and take a photograph using every combination of Hipstamatic Film and Lens that I have (@23/09/2019 – nts – do not buy any more packs, this is hard enough already!) I made a spreadsheet (I’m an Excel addict, colour coding and formulas are a particular favourite) and worked out that there are 23,600 possible combinations of the films and lenses that I have!

As I have a lot of options to cover I’m including historical photographs going back to when I first started to use Hipstamatic and I’m not ruling out using the app to edit photographs that I haven’t posted anywhere online before.

This is going to take a while.