ArtBistro

Photographs. What started out way back when as pictures on tin or glass plates had progressed through the years to the point where there's actually noting behind the lens now—no plates, no film, just an electronic image sensor. Makes for great pictures, but it does lose a bit of the mystique of photography in the process.

Digital cameras aren't the first "take a photo and look at it right now" solution. Back in the day Edwin Land created the Polaroid camera, supposedly to mollify an impatient child who didn't want to wait for the film to come back from the drug store to see the photos that had been taken. The film stock and the necessary chemicals were packaged together so that taking a snapshot and developing it were really just each a part of part of the same process. Polaroid pictures were characterized, among other things, by the ever-present white border around the margins of the photo. You can recapture that look with a tool named Rollip.

With your digital photo, you can choose how to crop the image, imperfections to add (maybe a nice coffee mug stain?), and text to write in the margin. Click the button, and your image is uploaded, processed, and you're given a link to click to download your masterpiece.

Rollip is a free service. You'll need a web browser (and Internet access) to use it.