I often wonder whether at any point older digital photographs will look “old” to us in a charming way, the way that old film photographs or Polaroids look to us now. It seems unlikely, because the imperfections of older digital photographs, like grainy digital noise in the shadows, never looked all that appealing to me. I have no feeling of nostalgia or sense of history when I look at an old digital photo. It doesn’t look old-timey in the way that an 1800s sepia tone family portrait might, or a Polaroid snapshot with its trademark white border.

Still, there might be something to be said for old digital photos, at least in terms of how an older camera’s constraints might shape both the raw material of the captured image and the end product of any editing.

While cleaning my office this afternoon, I came across my Canon S90, a higher end pocket camera that debuted in 2010. After a bit of thought, I placed it into the “donate” bin. In the past few years, my Ricoh GR2 and my iPhone 7 have taken its place as cameras for street photography and those circumstances when a large DSLR simply isn’t practical (i.e. most of the time). Meanwhile, the S90 has just gathered dust.

By coincidence, the next folder in my photo backlog included S90 shots taken in New York City back in 2015. As I edited them, I found that despite the GR2 and iPhone 7 likely being better cameras, there was still something to these that I enjoyed.

Editing them took me back in time a bit, as I remembered how I’d tend to edit low-lit photographs or nighttime street scenes taken with this camera. If I tried to brighten the whole image, the parts of the image that were darkest would quickly show a lot of unappealing looking digital grain. To hide that, I pulled down the far left end of the curve, crunching those shadows down to near-black. Then, I stuck a point at the center of the curve and pulled the mid-values back up.

This usually resulted in high contrast and saturated colors, in amounts that I would have likely backed off from if I were using a different camera.

This isn’t a broadly recognized nostalgia generating effect like sepia tones or Polaroids, but it is something that, to me, is specific to this particular camera, and it brings back memories. I will use this to justify my pack rat tendencies, and will likely hold on to this old camera for a few more years at least.