Behind The Scenes Of HipstaLand

Here’s just a handful of the amazing Hipst-a-Day photos posted last week. Keep ‘em coming! Stay up to date by checking the calendar here.

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Check out Beyoncé’s new Tumblr, which features some excellent Hipstamatic pics! Long live Queen B!

(Source: beyonce)

Win 2 VIP Passes to the Austin Food & Wine Festival!

Calling All Foodies!

Spending your spring near Austin, TX? Then you’re in luck! Hipstamatic is proud to offer 2 VIP Passes to the Austin Food & Wine Festival, April 27-29.

Presented by FOOD & WINE magazine, the Austin Food & Wine Festival features top-shelf talent from across the nation and Austin’s own acclaimed gourmet scene, as well as live musical guests. Join us for a weekend of total indulgence—from tacos and tequila to grilling and grapes, spoil yourself with the sights, sounds and laid-back flavor only the “Live Music Capital of the World” can offer.

Valued at $1,700, these two VIP Passes include reserved seating at 35+ food demos, wine and cocktail seminars, access to VIP evening events (including “New Taste of Texas” with Lucinda Williams and “Rock Your Taco” with Mayer Hawthorne), and more.

Post your best Hipstamatic food photos on Facebook with the caption #HipstaAustin, or tweet them with that hashtag, for a chance to win! The winner will be selected Tuesday, April 17th.

For more on the Austin Food & Wine Festival, like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter at @austinfoodwine!

The VIP Passes include:

Reserved seating at 35+ food demos, wine and cocktail seminars + 3 Grand tastings with 90 + wineries, spirits, restaurants and food artisans, access to VIP evening events, Friday’s “New Taste of Texas” featuring Lucinda Williams and Saturday’s “Rock Your Taco” event featuring Mayer Hawthorne.

The top five community-voted entries for our Made In America contest!

More of our fantastic Made In America entries.

Here’s the first batch of our faves for the Made In America contest. We combed through 5,000 entries to find those photos that took our breath away—there were many! Thank you to everyone who entered, and stay tuned for our announcement of official winners.

Part 2 of our Best of SXSW—featuring Conveyor, Miracles of Modern Science, Kevin Barnes (lead singer of Of Montreal), Absinthe & the Dirty Floors, Bandpage Headquarters, and Nic Adler (of our fab new Groupie SnapPak!).

We’re still in a post-SXSW daze. Especially in Austin, a picture really does speak a thousand words—there’s no better way to capture the magic (and the crazy). Peep this first round of our ‘Best Of’ photos, or see the whole shebang on Facebook.

And the winners are…

These are some of the gorgeous entries in our #HipstaWall Pink Floyd contest. Thank you to everyone who entered, and congratulations to @superagentfred, @kmrartist, and @joseelretardo for their lovely winning shots!

Hipstamatic 250: Sharing has never been sexier.

You’re already snapping gorgeous pics, so why not spread the love? Hipstamatic 250 makes sharing sleek, sexy, and easy (in a good way). 

We’ve streamlined sharing, so you can upload photos to multiple networks at once: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Family Album, and Instagram. The fine folks at Fast Company noted: “Now, when users snap a pic on Hipstamatic, they’ll have the option to push the photo to Instagram, just as one might push a Foursquare check-in to Twitter. Users can auto-tag the photo with the particular lens, film, and flash used, and add a comment—all from Hipstamatic.”

Flip through HipstaPrints with new-found ease: zoom in and out, swipe from side-to-side. It’s like doing the finger hustle.

Keep track of those party photos: you can now tag Facebook friends within the Hipstamatic app, easy peasy. 

View each photo’s history. Double tap the photo to see more information, like the lens, flash, and film combo. If you scroll, it also shows you the history of that photo’s social shares.

Interview: Tanlines

We caught up with Eric and Jesse of Tanlines in between SXSW shows. The New York duo was gearing up for the release of debut album Mixed Emotions (out today!), and sat down to discuss their journey, creative process, and making music that matters.

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You guys have a history of putting out great material, but Mixed Emotions is your first album. Talk about that journey, and how it’s been growing and collaborating.

Jesse: It’s like any relationship you have with another person. You get to know someone extremely well, and we have a common foundation of ideas—things we like that we agree on, and we have things we disagree on. It’s a creative partnership. We did a lot of songs for a couple years—remixes, songs on the Internet, et cetera, so we were like, we’re done with that, we’re going to sit down and write this album.

We took our time, we took over a year to do it. We learned an enormous amount about music, and ourselves, and we knew a lot already. I think this is the second phase of what we’re doing. We didn’t want to just release songs on the Internet anymore, we wanted to make a statement, and that’s what I think the album is. It’s like a next step from what we were doing before. I’m incredibly proud of it, and what else could I ask for? (Except for everyone to like it, and for it to change everyone’s lives. Just a small thing like that. But that’s out of my hands, so…)

What influences did you have when you were coming up with the album?

Jesse: This is extremely cliché, but we just wanted to focus on writing songs. The first period of our career was experimenting with sounds and releasing tracks, and we sort of developed a palette of sounds. Now for this we just drew from that palette, and we just wanted to write songs that might mean something to people. The best thing we did in the first two years was writing “Real Life”—that was the first song we wrote that we played for people and they knew the words, or they would ask for it. And I think a lot of people have that experience, where they see that, and they’re like, ‘oh—that’s the thing. That’s the thing that you want.’

So we were just like, all right. We just want to write songs. We wrote a lot of songs that didn’t make it onto the album, and the ones we kept going back to are the ones that are on the album.

What do you think of the Internet and music discovery today? How do you think of it as a tool?

Jesse: I mean, it’s great, obviously. The first thing we ever did as a band was a thing on the Internet. That’s how a lot of people work now, and if we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have gone anywhere else. We did that for a while, then we stopped and wrote this album, and now we’re trying to do something past the Internet. I think that the Internet is like: check out this song, done; next song, done; next song, done. There’s still a place for music that sticks with you, you know? If you think about your favorite songs, you’ve been listening to those for twenty years, maybe, and you still listen to it. Your favorite movie you’ve maybe seen three, four, five, ten times. But I can’t make that happen—I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but that’s a thing that exists outside of the Internet. The Internet can be a launching pad for that, and that’s what I’m hoping happens with [Mixed Emotions].

At Hipstamatic, we’re all about telling stories through moments, and through photos. How do you think SXSW fits into your story, if it does? Do you think this is capturing a moment for you?

Jesse: What I think about a lot here is that the people I want to play for are the kids who live in Kansas. Bands don’t stop on their tour, and they’re on the internet listening to music all the time. They get to see Grimes four times, and Tanlines, or whoever it is—it must be paradise for them. And that’s what [SXSW] is good for, because we’ve never been to Kansas, and maybe we will soon, I’m not sure; there are places that are harder to get to. That’s what I try to stay focused on here.

How would you sum up where you are as a band at this moment?

Jesse: I don’t know. I feel like we’re a million miles away from where we started from, and that’s important to feel. Other than that…like I said, we worked extremely hard.

Eric: one word: excited.

We stopped by the Creators Project this past weekend in San Francisco and saw great art, music, and technology. Performances by the Antlers, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Zola Jesus, and more happened alongside innovative installations and beautiful SF scenery. Welcome to the Bay, CP! You’re right at home. 

Friday marked the first field trip of Hipstamatic Kids Club to the Haus of Hipstamatic!

Sack lunches in tow, the fourth graders came to learn about the history of Hipstamatic, meet the team, ask questions, and practice taking pictures. The kids are taking a photography class taught by Karen Kline, and this year they’re learning all the fun and spontaneity of Hipstamatic. In June, we’ll be featuring their work in a gallery show to celebrate their creativity and confidence that the photo club has helped build for them. We had a great time with them, and can’t wait for the upcoming show!

The Creators Project featured this Hipstamatic stop-motion video a few weeks ago. We always knew they had great taste.