Today’s photo is what I think of as a “playing around” photo, where you take a picture and play around with it until you come up with something fun or goofy or both. 

If you’re in my age bracket, you went to birthday parties in the 70s and 80s and invariably somebody had a Polaroid camera. You may not have known this, but Polaroid developed a photo app, Polamatic, which you can get in the App Store. It’s a pay app, but it can be a ton of fun. 

January and February is birthday season in my house, which means we have birthday paraphernalia lying around in various states of use. Take this package of birthday candles, for example. I liked the look of the package of candles with one missing. But by itself, it’s a kind of uninteresting image. 

That’s were the Polaroid app comes in. After a few touch ups in Snapseed, mainly just cropping and rotation, I imported the image into Polamatic. From their you can chose the kind of Polaroid film you want to use, any filtered effects, and the border of the picture. 

The end result? A birthday image straight out of the 70s.