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Somewhere in your attic or basement, or your mom’s attic or basement (or maybe your grandma’s attic or basement), are boxes and boxes of old family photos. You know the ones. The colors are all wonky. The subjects are off-center. They’re under- or over-exposed, grainy and poorly-focused. They’re, in a word, bad (and that’s exactly what makes them awesome).

Back up 30 years or so, and you’ll find the reason: millions of cheap, mostly-plastic cameras. First manufactured in the mid-’60s, the new point-and-shoots like Kodak’s Instamatic made it a snap to snap a photo. With their fixed focal length, aperture and shutter speed, did it really matter if it the color was a little off? For under $10 (or, for a limited time, free with the purchase of Scott paper towels), Dad could finally get that shot of Mom’s squinty-eyed glare as she unwrapped the vacuum cleaner he got her for Valentine’s.

Anyway, enough storytelling. Some genius (actually several geniuii) has/have successfully brought back the crappy camera craze, in the form of an iPhone app called Hipstamatic. With its multiple ‘lenses,’ ‘film’ choices and ‘flash’ effects, you can take your own wonky-colored, off-center, poorly-focused masterpieces – only now it’s all digital. So Dad now has the ability to point, shoot, and upload that photo to Facebook before Mom can say “Don’t you dare…” But for his sake, I hope he learned his lesson the first time.

Anyone who knows me knows it’s my favorite-est app ever. And tons of point-and-shooters out there concur; it’s become one of the most-downloaded apps in the iTunes store AND was recently named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best iPhone Apps for 2011. There’s even a high-profile Hipstamatic exhibition going on right now at the Orange Dot Gallery in London.

Bottom line: With the ability to turn the most boring of shots into frame-worthy objets d′art, Hipstamatic allows any yahoo with an iPhone (like me) to take some truly kickass photographs. Which is probably highly insulting to the truly kickass photographers out there.