A deliberately imperfect amateur snapshot: friends at a cramped restaurant table shot with direct on-camera flash, everyone blown out and shiny, harsh black shadow outlines on the wall behind, red-eye on one person, a bottle half cut off in the foreground. Slightly crooked horizon. Cheap point-and-shoot look, timestamp burned into the corner. Genuinely unpolished, not stylish

A frame grabbed from an old VHS home video: a birthday cake carried into a dim living room, heavy analogue artefacts throughout — chroma bleeding red beyond the candle flames, horizontal tracking noise across the lower third, ghosting trails behind the movement, low resolution and soft. A blocky white date and time stamp in the corner. 1990s camcorder look

An accidental photo taken while lowering the camera: the frame tilted about thirty degrees, motion blur smearing the whole image, the photographer's own finger partially covering the top left corner as a huge out-of-focus blob, and the subject — a street food stall — half out of frame at the bottom. Overexposed sky in the gap. Genuinely a mistake, not an artful one

A disposable camera photo from a night out: heavy grain, strong green cast from mixed indoor lighting, the flash falling off steeply so the background is nearly black, two people mid-laugh slightly out of focus, one blinking. A slight orange light leak streak along the right edge. Genuinely rough, cheap film look

A photo of a beautiful sunset that came out badly: the phone exposed for the bright sky so the entire foreground — a beach and people — is a crushed black silhouette with no detail, and the sky is banded into visible steps of orange with compression blocking. A smudged lens giving hazy bloom around the sun

An early digital camera photo from around 2004: a cat on a windowsill, very low resolution with visible JPEG compression blocks, oversharpened halos around every edge, purple fringing along the bright window frame, harsh unnatural colour and blown highlights. Clearly resized up. Dated technology look

A photo taken through a rain-covered bus window with the phone autofocusing on the wrong thing: the water droplets on the glass perfectly sharp while the city street beyond is a soft blur of light smears. Reflections of the bus interior ghosting across the middle. Slightly crooked. An accident that happens to look good

A photo of a photo: an old printed family snapshot lying on a kitchen table, shot from above with a phone. The print has a curled corner, a crease and slight fading to magenta. The phone's own shadow falls across part of it and a reflection of the ceiling light sits on the glossy surface. Everyday, unstyled

A Polaroid instant photo of a dog sleeping on a sofa, physically held between finger and thumb against a plain wall. The picture inside the white frame has the classic Polaroid faults: milky washed-out highlights, a heavy cyan-green colour cast, soft focus, uneven development leaving a darker band down one side. The thick white border is slightly grubby with a visible thumbprint. Shot as a physical object with real depth, not a flat scan

A still frame grabbed from a 1998 consumer camcorder tape of a family at a riverside picnic. Standard-definition 4:3 video look: soft mushy detail, visible horizontal interlacing combing on anything that moves, smeared red and orange chroma bleeding past the edges of a child's jacket, crushed shadows, a faint band of tracking noise across the lower fifth of the frame. Automatic exposure hunting has blown out the sky to flat white. Burned into the lower right corner in the camcorder's blocky orange seven-segment character font is exactly the text "1998 08 15" on one line and "PM 4:37" on the line below it, slightly aliased with a thin black drop shadow. Handheld, tilted a few degrees, the subject drifting off centre as the operator pans too fast. Ordinary people, ordinary clothes, nothing staged. The overlay text must read exactly as specified. No real company logo, no real brand name.

A 35mm colour film photograph of two friends sitting on a low wall outside a corner shop on a summer afternoon, ruined by a light leak. The camera back was opened for a moment while the frame was still in the gate: the right third of the image is washed out by a broad soft flare of orange and magenta that fades from a bright cream core at the edge into the picture, eating the face of the person on the right and leaving only a silhouette of their shoulder. The left side of the frame is correctly exposed and shows normal warm afternoon film colour with fine grain. A faint horizontal fogging band bleeds across the top edge. Slight halation around the shop's fluorescent sign. Sprocket-edge fogging visible at the very top of the frame. Casual snapshot framing, not composed. Real film photograph, ordinary people, no styling. No real company logo, no real brand name.

An accidental double exposure on 35mm colour film: the photographer rewound the roll wrongly and shot over frames that were already exposed. Two unrelated scenes are superimposed at roughly equal density — a half-length portrait of a young woman standing in a hallway, and a window with a grid of panes looking onto bare tree branches. The window's mullions run diagonally across her face and shoulder, and the bright sky between the panes eats away her cheek to nothing; her hair reads clearly only where the window was dark. Colours are muddied where the two exposures pile up, with a greenish cast in the overlap and blown highlights that have no detail left. Visible film grain, slight registration blur, an uneven horizontal seam where the frame boundaries did not line up. Nothing about it is deliberate or elegant. Real film photograph, ordinary clothing, no styling. No real company logo, no real brand name.

A photograph taken of a CRT television screen with a camera, in a dim living room at night. The whole frame is filled by the curved glass of the tube showing a paused scene, and every artefact of photographing a CRT is present: strong moiré interference patterns rippling across the picture, a dark horizontal refresh band cutting across the lower third where the shutter caught the scan mid-refresh, visible aperture-grille scan lines, RGB phosphor triads breaking up in the bright areas, and a soft glow blooming off the highlights. The curved glass reflects the dark room back — the silhouette of a sofa arm, a ceiling light as a small hard white oval, and faintly the photographer holding the camera up. Slight barrel distortion at the tube's corners, dust on the glass, the plastic bezel visible along the top edge. Handheld, very slightly tilted. Real amateur photograph. No real company logo, no real brand name.

A flatbed-scanned old colour print of a family standing in front of a house, showing every defect of a cheap home scan. The print does not fill the scanner glass: a thin dark border of the closed scanner lid runs along two edges, and one corner of the print has lifted off the glass so that a soft grey shadow and a slight blur creep in from that corner. Dust specks and a few hairs sit on the glass and appear as sharp dark flecks over the image. A greasy thumbprint arc crosses the lower left, catching the scanner's light as a dull sheen. The print itself has aged: overall magenta shift, faded blacks gone brown, a white crease line running down through the middle where it was folded, and a scalloped white border with rounded corners. Fine paper texture visible. No sharpening, slightly soft overall. Real scan of a real snapshot. No real company logo, no real brand name.

A handheld night photograph of a small Korean commercial street, taken at about a quarter of a second so that camera shake has smeared everything. Every point light source — shop signs, a traffic light, tail lamps, a streetlamp — is drawn out into a jagged zigzag streak that repeats the same shape across the frame, because the hand moved in one continuous wobble. The signs' Hangul lettering is stretched into unreadable coloured ribbons. Darker areas are just noise. One pedestrian is a soft double image with a semi-transparent ghost of a second position. The overall exposure is still too dark, with heavy luminance noise and blotchy chroma noise in the shadows, and the automatic white balance has gone orange under sodium light. Framing is careless, the horizon tilted about four degrees. Real amateur phone or compact camera photograph. No real company logo, no real brand name.

A badly exposed backlit snapshot: someone stood their friend directly in front of the low afternoon sun and the camera metered for the sky. The subject is a near-black silhouette with almost no facial detail — only a faint rim of light along one shoulder and the frizz of their hair. The sun sits just outside the top edge of the frame, throwing a chain of hexagonal and circular lens flare ghosts diagonally across the picture, one of them a large washed-out green disc landing exactly over the face. A broad veiling haze lifts the contrast of the whole lower half to a milky grey, and the horizon is barely distinguishable. The background sky is correctly exposed and banded from over-compression. Dust on the front element shows as bright specks in the flare. Casual centred framing, slight tilt. Real amateur photograph, no styling. No real company logo, no real brand name.

A machine-printed colour photograph from a neighbourhood one-hour photo lab, printed with the wrong colour balance. The scene is an ordinary indoor birthday table under fluorescent ceiling light, and the automatic printer has failed to correct for it: the entire print carries a heavy green-cyan cast, skin tones are sallow and slightly grey, the white tablecloth prints as pale mint, and the reds of the food are dull and turned brick. Contrast is flat and slightly milky, blacks lifted to dark grey. Automatic exposure has also printed a stop too bright, so the window at the back is featureless white. The print has a glossy surface catching a faint sheen, a thin white border with the frame number printed small along one edge, and a rounded corner. Fine dot pattern of the print visible on close inspection. Ordinary family snapshot framing, one person blinking. Real machine print. No real company logo, no real brand name.

A self-portrait taken of a reflection in a shop window at night, with the flash on. The flash has bounced straight back off the glass: a hard white blown-out disc sits in the middle of the frame with a soft halo around it, erasing the photographer's chest and part of their chin. Their face is visible above the burst but underexposed and slightly out of focus, because the camera focused on the glass surface instead of the reflection. Layered over the reflection, the shop interior behind the glass shows through — shelving, a strip light, a mannequin's leg — competing with the mirrored street. Secondary reflections of the flash repeat as two smaller ghost discs offset diagonally. Fingerprints and street dust on the glass catch the light. The framing is crooked, the phone held low, one arm cropped at the edge. An ordinary person in ordinary clothes, no posing, no styling. Real amateur phone photograph. No real company logo, no real brand name.