I’m not really a SooC fetishist, but leaving the X half’s timestamp turned on made me feel kind of uncomfortable about my reflexive straightening and cropping when I imported the images: It created an obvious cant or shift in the position of the stamp.

I think I’ll leave it on. I’ve gotten so used to having megapixels to spare that any time I take pictures in the city I rush a little to minimize how much time I’ve got the camera to my face, and I just fix composition and straightness in post. Maybe this’ll shame me into rectitude. Back to the basics. Sent to the farm for fresh air and hard work.

I recently chatted with a college age person about photography and social media. He has a friend who is very considered in her Instagram posting and tries to take nice pictures. He mentioned always noticing when her phone goes horizontal because it means she is composing. I think – he didn’t say this but I think I understand the dialect – those are probably considered “aesthetic” pictures in the way “aesthetic” has become an adjective.

My informant, on the other hand, prefers an aesthetic. He sort of wants his pictures to look a little tossed off and messy. Capturing the moment is a higher priority than taking a nice picture, and enjoying the moment is a higher priority than capturing it. Or at least those are the values the picture is meant to convey. If his Instagram was too curated and his photos too considered, it’d be saying the wrong thing about him.

I can’t generalize too much because I probably only read a few dozen X half reviews, but “responds to the idea of spontaneous capture with little regard for the niceties of composition, lighting, and focus” was a definite class of reviewer, in some contrast to the “tourist/walkabout snapshot” people, and in stark contrast to the “staid urban still life” and “arty jank aesthete” people.

In every case, the little orange timestamp sort of pulls the image into a little persona. The oblivious party snapshot shooter, the film-burning tourist clicker, and the Goodwill $2 camera find, battery-held-in-with-electrical tape art crank. There’s a dweebishness to the time stamp – I associate it with a traveling companion who stole salt and sugar packets and secreted them into a ZipLoc “just in case” – but also maybe obliviousness, and also maybe disinterest in that particular detail in a “the best artists are a little slovenly because they’re laser focused on the muse” kind of way.

I think, as I get familiar with it and quit trying to understand how everything works I am going to end up drifting into the jankier end of the spectrum. I really enjoyed Jana Mänz’s Wabi Sabi Photo School few years ago. I put a little toy body cap lens on my X-Pro3 and lived with the fixed focus slow lens limitations. I still like seeing the things that came out of it once I got on a roll with it.

Which sort of raises the question, where does the creative spontaneity lie, anyhow? In a moment of abandoned capture, or the singlemindedness of letting the time stamp get cut off and tilted in pursuit of the thing that should look just so?