Remember the good ol’ days of personal photography? The days of limited film rolls; of crappy yellow cameras you bought at the drug store?
None of this “Oh, you blinked? Don’t worry — I can retake it!” digital nonsense. More like “You blinked? Enjoy looking at your dumb blinking face in the photo album for the rest of eternity.”
Did you get a picture of that beautiful landscape, or did you get another picture of your big stupid thumb?
Wait, nevermind. Those days were awful.
And yet… there was something sort of magic about it. Your precious moments disappeared into this little black box, only to be plucked back into reality days/weeks/whenever the hell you remembered to get the film developed/years later.
That’s the idea behind WhiteAlbum: you get 24 pictures. You take the photo, it disappears into the film roll. Only once you’ve taken all 24 shots and they’ve mailed the developed photos to your door are you able to see the photos you shot.
$20 gets you an album of printed photos, and that includes delivery. The photos are printed at 4×5″ in a pretty, Polaroid-esque layout.
There’s something lovely about the idea, at first — but after that, it’s a bit of a tough sell. It banks largely on the nostalgia of having grown up in the heyday of the disposable camera, of missing the days when seeing a photo for the first time came with a load of anticipation.
Is that enough to get people to fork over $20 for 24 pictures? More importantly, to get them to fork it over more than once? There’s a reason that smartphones have rained utter destruction upon the traditional camera market.
It seems like a product in search of a market that I’m not sure exists. A group that wants all of the advantages of a modern digital camera — the reusability, the improved optics — but who would be willing to pay money to wait to see their photos. We can shout “LOL! Hipsters will love this!”; meanwhile, the actual hipsters busy themselves shooting photos onto sheets of iron and putting wax in their facial hair or something.
Ah, well. Perhaps there’s a larger market for this than I’m seeing. If you’re a part of that group, you can find WhiteAlbum in the iOS App Store right over here.
[Found via ProductHunt. Hi Ryan!]
