This photograph by Adam Rhodes looks like a haphazardly developed still photo pulled from a 1950s snuff film. But it’s not that at all. It was taken from an iPhone and printed using an old-fashioned photo enlarger.
Rhodes developed a “Digital Darkroom” technique for funelling the light from iPhone’s display to through an enlarger and using it to expose photosensitive paper. From there, he simply developed the photos using chemicals — the way photos were developed in the decades before digital photography took over.
As Rhodes points out, the vignetting on the photographs is caused by the limitations of his method, which allows light to leak from around the edges of the phone. Rhodes also claims something we’d never heard before: the centre of the iPhone is much brighter than the edges. The resulting images look like they were developed in a time when photography techniques were still rudimentary.
If nothing else, Rhode’s method is a refreshing counterpoint to the de rigueuer crudeness of smartphone photography. [Adam Rhodes via Peta Pixel via Cult of Mac]