Shooting with instant film is quite different than shooting on an iPhone. iPhone images are perfect: after all, they use machine learning and complex algorithms to dynamically relight and automatically edit images. They document reality with great precision. But instant film doesn’t do any of that: instant film requires no editing at all, nor does it permit editing even if you desire it. The photo you take is the photo you get, with all the beautiful streaks, blemishes, bleeds, and spots that the iPhone tries to mimic with artsy ‘filters’. Instant film never comes out perfect — the photos are messy colorful tinted washed out and burned, complete with all the burnishing of a brand new story, and all the scuffing deserving of a well-worn memory, so that we are immediately nostalgic for a moment not half an hour past. What a photo!

But the iPhone has even more features! The iPhone can hold tens of thousands of photos, and taking photos is free! Geoff from accounting blinked? Take another! On the other hand, instant film photos aren’t free at all; in fact, they cost about two dollars a pop, and there are only 8 or 10 of them in a box of film. Choose your photos wisely! However, it turns out that when it costs money to take photos, the photos you do take become more valuable, even if they don’t turn out perfectly. No more do-overs if someone has a hair out of place, no more “let’s take two” or “just one more shot”: your bad hair day will just have to be part of the story, as there is not enough film or money to create the manicured, manufactured photos of the perfect life you don’t actually live. And that’s okay, and you’ll slowly realize that you’re okay with it, too. Your photos (your stories) might actually be better this way after all.

Now wait a minute though: why would anyone pay two dollars for a photo? As it happens, instant film has the wonderful quality of being a physical object, which gives it a certain advantage over digital images. Instant film takes the process of sharing, where photos are duplicated and distributed on the internet, and transmogrifies it into something different: the process of giving. After all, there is only one Polaroid: one artifact of the beautiful memory you deemed worthy of posterity. You can try to take a photo of the Polaroid, but you will find that whoever has the image has nothing, and whoever holds the physical print has everything. If you decide to give away the photo, you will have given a gift at once priceless, unique, meaningful, and personal. A gift with a story: and for only two dollars! Or, if you decide to keep it, you will have a new memory or new piece of artwork with which to decorate your home — not like a digital file, which merely decorates the inside of your hard drive. The price of film, therefore, is simply a matter of perspective — and besides, you can afford plenty of film now that you’re not splurging for a new iPhone.

The humble instant film camera doesn’t have any of the bells and whistles on the new iPhone, but it still has one killer feature the iPhone doesn’t: good old-fashioned magic. In search for better photos? Forget fancy cameras: take a cheap instant film camera and focus on finding better moments to photograph, better stories to tell. The secret to taking better photos isn’t to have a better camera, but to live a richer life. Because at the end of the day, what matters is not what’s inside the camera, but what’s on the other end of it.