© Hilda Randulv

How much work, do you think, it takes to excel at some­thing? Plenty, right? We all know that. But how much effort one really needs to cre­ate a ‘career’ when you’re just start­ing out?

Plenty of time and really thick face.

‘Dreams’ is just one of Manik Nur haq’s elab­o­rate attempt to go from zero to hero. A very thought­ful one, I must say, for it elab­o­rately not only cre­ate what looks like a photo book, but also to make it look like it has won an award of some sort.

And it doesn’t stop there. From Susan Core:

[…] She claims work­ing for [sic]: Elle, Versace, FashionTV, SanFranciscoChronicle, MetropolitanMuseumOfArt, Ford Models, W Hotels Worldwide, Vanity Fair, Volkswagen USA, Leica Camera, Audi USA, Loreal, Land Rover USA, Artful Dodger, National Geographic, BMW USA, Vogue, Ford Motor Company, TOYOTA, Australian Geographic, ArtGalleryOfWesternAustralia & more…

Now, the whole thing might be just a coy, that per­haps some­one has got­ten angry and wants some­one to pay back, or it is too young and unwise to know that it is wrong, or it is just sim­ply a very clever sociopath that has noth­ing but free time and very, very thick face who thinks it has a rebootable life. But boy, look at how the inter­net, accord­ing to Google+ has reacted. By the time of this writ­ing, it has been shared 626 times, com­mented 324 times, and plussed by 123 inter­net persons.

Perhaps you knew it all along, you couldn’t have picked a bet­ter title for your fic­tional award-winning photo book. ‘Dreams’ is really just a dream for you, and it will always be until you wake up and smell the cof­fee. Or per­haps, Manik, your par­ents knew it too by pick­ing a name that mir­rors your dis­turb­ing tendency?

If you, Manik, some­how gets to read this: make bet­ter use of your time. You may get away win­ning the jobs from the peo­ple you manip­u­late, but know that you have gained noth­ing real. It’s never too late to stop and make amends.

© Will Wiriawan

Yours truly in December, 2009:

It’s a per­fect $5 christ­mas gift for your­self, or your iPhone-using-paparazzo friend, yes occa­sional crash still hap­pens and opt­ing in high-res out­put gives you the never-ending wait to snap another around, but you’re in for a dif­fer­ent kind of iPhone-photography game, peo­ple… and this time you might want to stay a lit­tle longer cause dig­i­tal never felt & looked so finely analog.

That was the day before Instagram, when the cam­era app mak­ers were dip­ping their toes in the water to find a bet­ter rev­enue stream rather than just the buy-once-use-forever model Apple has set toned since the begin­ning of the App Store.

It’s a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket. Making great apps is no easy, mak­ing them pop­u­lar is harder, and mak­ing money out of them is extremely dif­fi­cult. But the team behind Hipstamatic did it. It has grown from a mere app to a cult move­ment. Its in-app store car­ries $2 packs and franchise-sponsored good­ies to keep them in the game.

Somehow it’s not enough for them.

They have recently launched a free ‘social’ cam­era app called Hipstamatic Disposable:

The new Hipstamatic Disposable-series cam­era makes it a snap to cre­ate and share a cam­era with your friends. From the first snap to the last, every­one shoots to one album, and at the end pho­tos are mag­i­cally exchanged to all of the camera’s con­trib­u­tors. You’ll never have to swap dou­bles or email from your friend’s phone again. Sharing a roll of film has never been this much fun.

There’s the pitch: Sharing a roll of film has never been this much fun. What they didn’t tell you up front is that you need to pur­chase film packs. But unlike Hipstamatic’s this one actu­ally needs a vir­tual film reload. One that costs. You need to con­tinue to pur­chase new films when you run out of it, again, and again.

If they think they can get away from this, they’re totally delu­sional. Nobody will pay for some pseudo-analog app from a device that made them dis­cover the fun of pho­tog­ra­phy. Digital has made pho­tog­ra­phy main­stream, and the iPhone — with its thou­sands of photo apps — bring out the pho­tog­ra­phers out of almost every­one, it brings pho­tog­ra­phy to the mass the same way the inter­net did to infor­ma­tion. It made pho­tog­ra­phy afford­able and free.

People love Hipstamatic for it is fun. It is hon­estly good and it con­nects to the inner pho­tog­ra­pher in us. It was a great app and each sub­se­quent update has made it bet­ter. Financial ambi­tion will only ruin it. If the devel­op­ers want to be mil­lion­aires, go into the games mar­ket and invent a new Angry Birds, but if they truly believe some­thing like the Disposable will proof us wrong, they are lit­er­ally dis­pos­able as an app maker.