Will the iPhone 3GS give lo fi vibes? Let’s see!
“Ancient” iPhone 3GS has entered the chat!! 🙂
iPhone 3GS shot with a Nikon V1
iPhone 3GS shot with a Nikon V1
iPhone 3GS | Heavily Edited and Color Corrected
Behold, here are some amazing lo-fi aesthetic photos from the iPhone 3GS! Again thanks to Phalatda for letting me take a trip down memory lane with this lovely image making device. I’m being very serious here, this phone renders some images like a disposable film camera. The newer cameras and phones are super great for what they do, but many times you don’t need things to have that much clarity. Memories and dreams often aren’t that perfect.
Blown out highlights, crushed blacks, and questionable white balance wouldn’t even be looked at by your typical technical photographer, but to an artist, man this 3GS produces photos and videos that come pretty close to my other vintage aesthetic cameras–the legendary Digital Harinezumi and plastic lens Holga. It definitely has the “vibe” stat maxed out!
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Heavily Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera, This shot to my eye really looks close to a plastic lens disposable film camera. The smearing on the periphery is something you’d never get on modern iPhone or mirrorless camera with newer lenses. I’ve seen this look with the plastic Holga lens on m4/3 but for some reason I think this looks better.
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected | This looks like a scan of a 3×5 photo print from back in the day.
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected | Same thing here, the plastic lens aesthetic recalls a time period much earlier than 2009. Remember we had technically superior DSLR’s since 2000-2003, and those images would take a lot of filtering to get it to look this bad/good.
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected | The grain pattern on the 3GS files is actually pretty unique. It’s like a scan of a print from a laser printer, a few steps removed from real life unlike modern image sensors. It has a certain image signature, and most artists and cinematographers go at great lengths to find lenses that dull the image to complement their vision. It’s like the iPhone 3GS really is stuck in 2009 listening to M83! (I still do…)
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Slightly Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera
iPhone 3GS | Heavily Edited and Color Corrected
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera | The 3GS recalls Fujifilm Instax shots too.
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera | When the contrast is too much it looks like this. I do like the sun reflections in the lens though!
iPhone 3GS | Straight from Camera | Diffused Scrim to tame the highlights. This little iPhone is capable of producing nice technical shots too!
bts shots from our X100 adventure, when I brought out the real mvp of the day…
iPhone 3GS with maxed out vintage vibes! 🙂
Thanks to Sean for taking the above footage and the bts shots from last Sat! Here’s what I cut today to show the awesome vintage aesthetic of this ancient, but very usable iPhone 3GS. Time to take things back to 2009, when things were much simpler. Maybe that’s just the old man in me talking aloud. Anyways, enjoy!
A few More Photos:
iPhone 3GS | Cropped but straight out of camera | This iPhone has dust either in the lens or on the sensor itself. My X100 has dust inside the viewfinder as well, goes to show even if you have a sealed camera, dust will always find a way in. But yes, look at that shade of blue and the noise pattern. There really is something charming about this model iPhone. I compared it to another old Nikon digicam that I have, the Coolpix 3700, and you know that little Nikon is “too good!”
iPhone 3GS | Cropped but straight out of camera | I shot many frames of this scene and as the iPhone was struggling with autofocus, I decided that the out of focus one was the best one of the series. The little “burnt” reddish tones really recall the laser prints I used to get from the Kinko’s in college.
iPhone 3GS | Cropped but straight out of camera
iPhone 3GS | Cropped but straight out of camera | Just look at all that wonderful watercolor-like noise reduction combined with a noise pattern that looks pretty organic. At least much more organic than say the banding on Canon sensors when pushed in post. This image again looks like a print on paper with texture.
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2025 Update:
The other day I wanted to put my own wallpaper on the 3GS. Plugging it into my various computers I realized this old model iPhone, you can’t drop files into the DCIM folder. The years of AirDrop have spoiled us for sure.
As any vintage Apple user knows, the older devices don’t really fully support the internet. Many complex websites don’t load or look correct on a lot of my devices. So there’s no way I could snag a simple jpeg from my own website/journal. I was surprised that apple.com actually somewhat showed up on this 14 year old smartphone though!
So I decided to do it one old school way, by just making the simplest .html webpage on my site and put two 480 x 320 pixel images that I could manually save. It was one of those morning diversions that didn’t take that long, and was a reminder of the “good ol days.” 😠🤣
I think part of the charm of the older iPhone LCD screens is the cooler white balance. The pink/salmon colored paper is the same one as in the X100 Shot so you can see the difference.
