© copyright mood.camera 2024
I’ve been a mobile phone photography enthusiast since I owned my first iPhone. The power of having a decent camera in your pocket, ready to capture any moment, really excited me, even if it only had an 8-megapixel camera with poor low-light performance.
Over the past decade, phone cameras have made leaps forward with higher resolution sensors and a revolution in computational photography, giving us perfectly exposed, pin-sharp photos with every snap. On top of this, editing tools have become more powerful, offering greater control to perfect our images, while the recent wave of AI tools allows us to manipulate photos in ways we could only have imagined 10 years ago.
While these advancements are undeniably impressive, they've pushed mobile photography in a direction that aims for perfection and control, but in turn, has lost some of its inherent charm and serendipity.
mood.camera aims to reverse some of these trends, creating a hybrid between the convenience of a phone camera and the analog character of film. Not for the sake of nostalgia, but to steer mobile photography towards the simplicity of capturing the moment rather than obsessing over details and full control.
For the project I focussed on four guiding principles:
I wanted the photos produced by mood.camera to look like nothing else produced by a phone camera. Instead of focussing on sharpness and clarity, the images should have physicality and charm.
Each shot should carry an element of anticipation and surprise, echoing the experience of a film camera. This sense of mystery and excitement is something that has been largely lost in the era of instant digital gratification.
Encourage users to embrace uncertainty and lack of control, instead of obsessing over the perfect edit. This freedom from the pressure to produce flawless images, allows the photographer to rediscover the simple pleasure of taking photos.
It was important that I included enough control to allow creativity but kept the point-and-shoot essence of mobile photography at its core.
I started working on a prototype in October 2023 and immediately felt excited to use my iPhone for photography again. Over the next few months I spent evenings and weekends working towards a beta. After the beta launched on Reddit it quickly gained a small but engaged audience, whose feedback helped me fine tune the experience. Over 100,000 photos later and mood.camera was ready for launch in April 2024.
A special thank you to all those who gave me the feedback and encouragement to keep on building <3
© copyright mood.camera 2024