You have to cause a little pain to shed a little light.

Updating? Psssh. Obviously that is not a thing i do. A quick update of the past forever:

-left Boston, moved back to PA
-moved to Japan

I mean, some other stuff probably happened in there, but the gist of things is that i'm on some kind of crazy Big Adventure that may or may not have been a good decision but it sure is an experience. It's been a little more than a month now since i left the States, and i wish i could say i felt like i was settled, but i don't. Only today have i finally gotten unpacked all the way and my apartment presentable enough to take pictures, which is pretty pathetic even by my standards. And before anyone says it, yes, i know that it's not clean but it's a vast improvement from how things have been.

( a bigillionty pictures of my actually rather boring apartment. )

Okay so indecisive girl is indecisive but i also couldn't sleep so i just made an lj/dw for my photostuff. You can find it at idiomatron / idiomatron. Content will be identical, so friending both if you're straddling sites isn't really worth it.

Follow if it pleases you, ignore if it doesn't! The only content there will be photos, they are not behind cuts, they are probably all going to be quite worksafe (anything that wasn't would go behind a cut because i'm polite that way) and are either 400x600 or 500x500 depending on the format, with a click to embiggen. No one's pretending it's art or that i'm any good at pictures, but it breaks up the monotony and makes me look around, and that's never a bad thing.

So as we all know, i have an iphone. i love my iphone. And my shiny new iphone actually has a camera on it worth using, so i have been. Until now, my camera app of choice has been puddingcamera, which has the benefit of being free but the detractor of being entirely in Korean. It's easy enough to figure out, and considering its free, you get a lot of nice things with it.

But i've been curious for some time now about Hipstamatic. And i found a gift certificate my brother gave me last christmas. So i downloaded it, and I honestly think it's pretty cool, if you like lomo-style effects. I don't feel like i wasted my two bucks.

Hipsta comes with three 'lenses', two 'flashes', and three 'films'.

On the default package, 'films' don't do anything besides change the edges of your pictures. you can have regular white squared edges, off-white rounded edges, or rough edges, depending on your film. You can also buy other packages that have films that do other things, but i haven't, so we're not going into that here.

I can't tell yet whether Hipsta's 'flash' is mostly a magical processing thing or not, but it only works when the phone's flash goes off, and whether the flash goes is set manually in the program, not based on the phone-camera's lighting sensor. The basic program comes with two flashes, a normal one that adds extra light and possibly a very slight warming effect, and one called dreampop, which adds a random pastel colored flash in a very effect-y way.

Then there are the lenses. These are what make the biggest difference, and this is where I'm just going to start resorting to pictures, because it's easiest.

( and we cut the photos to save your flist )

Basically, i think this is a really fun toy. I like lomography, but i am way too poor to buy my ass a real lomo-style camera and film and do processing and such. And the app does have issues, like the fact that it crashes a lot for me (but so does puddingcamera, and that one has lost pictures too).

So yeah, i held out for a long time, but i think i like this photoapp. if nothing else, it gives me something to mess with while i'm out walking, and it makes taking pictures of everyday stuff more fun. Is this real photography? Debatable. But it IS fun, and it does encourage me to walk around snapping shots. So in this way it's a win.