I posted a few photos yesterday that probably didn’t look like normal photos. At least one sharp-eyed reader noticed and called me on it. Yes, Don, yesterday’s photo of Iggy was taken with iPhone using a free program called Instagram. Once you’ve taken a photo, you can choose among a handful of filters that apply a range of effects. In the case of the Iggy picture, the filter bumped up the saturation of the colors and knocked out some of the detail for a posterized feel.

I used the same one for this one of the kids, which I will use as the cover photo for their upcoming album, Double Trouble.

Other filters mute the color spectrum.

Some darken the edges of the visual field, which is helpful when one is trying to artfully obscure the objectionable bits of a naked child’s anatomy.

I lack the terminology and knowledge of photography to really describe what all these filters are doing. I’m sure that real photographers would recoil at this app. All I know is that applying the right filter to the right shot makes it somehow…better. Richer, more lovely, more artful, more magical, more something.

It is also making me take pictures I wouldn’t have before.

The road at night.

The big gas station just outside of Middletown.

The Delaware Memorial Bridge (ok, I might have photographed this before, but the result wouldn’t have looked as nice).

Some road between here and there.

The kitchen at Plaza Tapatilla.

The glasses hanging above the Plaza Tapatilla bar .

The doors of Luisa’s, looking out from inside.

Or my ceiling fan.

Before I got this app, I would never have taken a photo of my ceiling fan. But knowing I can apply a filter to a picture of something so ordinary and make it just a little more beautiful has given me a spark.

Of course, I’m taking more pictures of the kids than ever before.

Capturing Kato’s rage.

Or Alden’s delight.

Here’s a family portrait, an ordinary shot on the couch that probably wouldn’t have made it on the blog in its original state.

But add a filter, and it seems to capture a moment in time, making me feel that the photo is 30 years old, that I’m looking back on my life from a distant perspective.

And yet, I’m not. The kids are still kids and we are still muddling through the middle of our 30s. I’m sure that decades from now we’ll look back on these Instagram pictures as ill-advised products of a passing moment in technology.

But for now, it sure is fun to play.