"I'm not a photographer." That much is apparent. There are a couple of reasons the Instagram affects appeal to me, and I'm sure this applies to more people.

"I'm not a photographer." That much is apparent. There are a couple of reasons the Instagram affects appeal to me, and I'm sure this applies to more people. Nostalgia is fun. Memories have a way of distilling events down to their better parts. It's a natural adaptation. No one wants to remember the fight they had with their family on vacation. They want to remember the time that mom was startled by the bear that walked in to camp and went screaming in to the camper flailing the grilling instruments over her head. Mom, not the bear :) Not everyone looks good in photographs. Maybe I don't want my likeness archived in high fidelity. When I recall fond memories, I don't remember my pale complexion and baggy eyes. I remember where I was, who I was with, and the good time we were having. This much is apparent by everyone's expression. And here's the cool thing, humans don't require a high-fidelity photograph to guess the disposition of the person in a photograph. We require very little detail. That's the great thing about our brains. It fills in the blanks very well. Personally, I prefer to fill in the blanks a little bit. Cameras -- even film ones, and even big view cameras -- can't reproduce the full spectrum of color and dynamic range that the human eye can see. The result is that photographs often look "flat" in contrast to our memory of an event. When you look at photos taken by these old, vintage cameras, they have a certain warmth and color palette that doesn't match reality, but feels more interesting than a flat photo in some cases.