There's a new photography blog at the Times, called Lens. There are only a few posts so far, so there's no judging it on content at this stage of the game, but it gets high marks for presentation. The navigation is really beautifully done, and there's a full-screen mode and blah blah blah. Go play with it and see.

But what caught my interest was the short essay from Fred Conrad, whose beautiful photo is above, about what it means to shoot on large-format film in the digital age. I love everything he has to say about it, and this will sound silly but it ties in with my admiration for the ToyCamera app. I've linked before, elsewhere and surreptitiously, to this interview with the creator of the app. If you haven't seen it, it's worth reading. I'm one of those people who really mourn the death of Polaroid "instant" film. I was a devotee (particularly of the horizontal version that was resuscitated, for a time, for use in the JoyCam). The best thing about Polaroid film was that it wasn't instant — you had to wait for it. You took your shot, you waited to see what you got, and then maybe you shot again. But you were never frivolous about shooting when you were using Polaroid film. You thought about what you were doing and made every shot count, because you were always aware of the small number of shots per package of film, and the relatively high cost of each.

Until I read that interview with the ToyCamera creator, I hadn't really thought about how the functionality of it was fueling my attachment. ToyCamera re-crops your shot, asks for your approval, then (somewhat) randomly applies a filter from its bag of tricks. You wait while it processes and only then do you see what you got and ask yourself if you want to shoot another. It's a completely different experience from the woefully uneventful act of shooting with a digital camera.

I don't wave my iPhone around while I'm waiting for the image to appear, like we all did with Polaroids, but I am often tempted to stick it in my pocket while it does its thing.