Since the advent of brilliant cameras occupying the backs of our smartphones, it seems that everybody possesses camera that has the capability of taking truly remarkable photos. Once upon a time, Instagram in its entirety was a vibrant community of skilled mobile photographers shooting good photos. Their multitude of filters was amazing at helping to make the mundane interesting. The light shafts and burns were used sparingly and gave a realistic impression that the picture taken was shot on an old SLR camera with high-quality film stock. The photos taken, simply put, were good.

Four years and one take-over later, Instagram thrives with more than 200 million active users, unrivaled market share, and 66% year-on-year growth. Though these numbers are great, it also means that all your friends, family and even your parents are using Instagram – and unfortunately, that means your feed is dominated by boring cloudscapes, Starbucks coffee, underexposed selfies, and group photos washed out by the flash on your iPhone. You’ve seen every type of saturation known to humanity, ranging from the popular black-and-white to what you expect to see when you’re tripping on hard drugs. Contrast, once used to help bring out the important aspects of photos, have become ‘artistic’ ways of making faces look like Rorschach from Watchmen. The subtle essence of the filters has been lost. You’ve scrolled past the misuse of these filters so many times that you’ve become sick of the unreal, over-saturated snapshots of people’s lives. Once the forefront of mobile photography, the Instagram community of good mobile photographers has been drowned out by mass media.

However, all is not lost. There remains a sanctuary of excellent mobile photos, and they’re each tagged #vscocam. This is new face of mobile photography – free from your parents, your grandparents, and your friends. Surrounded by people that take photos of everyday life in a way that doesn’t make you want to gag with horror, you can see the extent of which cameras on mobile phones can do the job. We no longer have the excuse of saying ‘Oh, I don’t have a DSLR so I can’t take good photos’. There’s a community of more than a million who run around with their iPhones and Galaxies and take utterly amazing photos. They all shoot with VSCO Cam (available on Android and iOS), and bundle a set of excellent filters that make your shots look like you’ve taken them with Kodak Portra or Fuji Superia.

‘How do they make their photos look so good?’, you may ask. Unlike Instagram, VSCO has been making filters and presets for years used in professional applications such as in Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture, specializing in the emulation of film. "VSCO is the company coming closest to replicating the look of film without making it gimmicky," says William Wilkinson, a designer at software studio MetaLab. Out of the box, VSCO Cam doesn’t give you a lot of filters (a total of about ten, in fact), known as ‘presets’ within the app, but what you get is more than enough. They have strived to do away with the some of the more destructive editing methods in current mobile photography in favor of a more authentic feel, focusing on the detail, the character, and the composition of your photos.

Once you’ve finished editing, you can upload straight from VSCO to any social networking site you please, including your VSCO Grid – which feels like a minimalistic, modern, grid-based Tumblr theme focused on your photos and your photos only. In many ways, it’s like an Instagram profile gutted to the roots, made specifically to advertise your skills as a photographer. But unlike Instagram, there are no likes or comments in sight. “We’re not interested in creating another social network,” co-founder Joel Flory says,“We wanted to create a platform that honored the art created without likes or comments”. Users of VSCO often post to Instagram for feedback, which highlights where each system thrives: Instagram with communication, and VSCO with photography tools.

What was once a platform for a large community of mobile photographers has lost its original luster and become the latest Facebook; but that’s okay. The space that is left is a space that VSCO fills perfectly. In doing so, it’s building the next Instagram – not the next billion-dollar social network, but the app that truly moves the state of photography forward.

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2014 issue of UNIT-E. It was written by Ostin Kurniawan, a student at the Western Academy of Beijing.

About UNIT-E
UNIT-E was founded in the spring of 2010 with the aim of establishing a non-profit, student-run magazine for international students in Beijing. Staffed by current students from a range of international schools, the magazine provides an amalgam of cultural tidbits, fragments of Beijing student life, and a broad spectrum of unique perspectives from a diverse group of young adults.

Photo courtesy of VSCO.com

The maximum score is 1600. Essays are optional. No deductions for wrong answers. Vocabulary that you might actually use in real life. A complete change in focus. You might not believe it, but this will be the new face of the SAT Reasoning Test (colloquially known as just the “SAT”), starting in 2016. While this may not be the greatest news for today’s seniors, juniors, and sophomores (who will still have to take the test with the infamous archaic vocabulary),this is a sigh of relief for the freshmen and other students who do not plan to apply to university within the next two years.

For several decades, the SAT has become more prominent in the college admissions process, rivaling the ACT as the standardized test of choice in the United States. Roughly 800 of 3000 universities and colleges in the United States utilize the SAT and ACT as a possible supplements to university applications. Many Ivy League universities require applicants to submit SAT scores and have unconfirmedcutoffs for admissions based on these numerical scores – showing how integral these types of standardized testing are to the current state of the college admissions process. After all, we can only see it in black and white: either you’re accepted or you’re not. 

Thus, students such as you and I may start to stress over achieving high scores, with many wanting to at least be above the average SAT score of the previous year’sadmitted freshmen of our dream universities. We start to go to test prep courses, buy books, and do practce test after practice test. The Princeton Review and Kaplan have become almost household names for test prep books and courses thataim to maximize your SAT score, bringing it closer and closer to the famed 2400. Flash cards are commonplace when studying for the Critical Reading sections of the SAT plagued with the infamous archaic vocabulary – students “stop reading and start flipping”. Many now say that the SAT is no longer an accurate reflection of school curriculum – but instead a test of how well you can take a test. This “test-taking ability” stigma is further supported by longstanding criticisms of the SAT stating that “students from wealthier households do better on the exam because they can afford expensive test preparation classes”.

2016’s overhauled SAT aims to address all these problems by omitting and changing the nature of the SAT. Test prep will become accessible to all (not only students with a higher socio-economic status) through a College Board partnership with Khan Academy (a service that provides free step-by-step videos on topics ranging from mathematics to economics) and by reducing the dependence on SAT prep courses, leveling the playing field for all students, regardless of background. Arcane language is omitted in favor of more in-depth, contextual vocabulary. "If kids learn words richly in this way through wide reading rather than flashcards, they are deeply prepared to widen their appreciation of the nuances of language,” College Board President David Coleman writes.

History and Science are also to be integrated into reading comprehension questions, allowing for a greater scope of knowledge required instead of the traditional focus on only math, reading, and writing. Essays have become optional, as critics have said that a single piece of timed writing is a very limited way of judging an individual’s writing ability. In many ways, the SAT is adopting many characteristics of the ACT, which surpassed the SAT in 2012 as the most-popular standardized test in the United States and has maintained its spot to this day.

Despite its flaws, standardized testing is necessary and we have to live with the reality. “[Universities] absolutely need a standardized exam to compare students by,” Shaan Patel of Veritas Prep says. “It’s sort of a necessary evil. It’s something that will never go away."

Although the SAT is not the most perfect way to test students on the road to college admission, these changes, at least on paper, seem to allow the SAT to more accurately reflect what students are learning in school.

Unfortunately, 2016 can’t come any sooner. Time for the rest of us to buy some prep books.

Photo courtesy of ccarlstead (Flickr)