Besides altering the camera market, the smart-phone has effectively killed the joy and pride a person could experience taking a really nice picture. When J was a child, I gave her my entry level SLR camera which was already an old model by then. She learned to take good pictures using that camera. Sometimes on weekends we went to parks and wooded areas around town for her to take pictures.
We had our favorite streets downtown where she enjoyed taking the scenery. Once she got her first smart-phone, things started to change. There were some very artistic selfies but pictures of the world around her that she had a good eye for, started to become few and far between. J has lived in some interesting places over the last few years but that did not promote any picture taking.
Her logic was that any place that well touristed has been photographed to death down to the last street intersection and building. There is no new story to tell there, no new way to see what millions of others have seen and documented. She is not interested in adding to this infinite repository. Back in her childhood, there was something novel to see even in the park nearest to our house. The way she looked at the ducks in the pond was unique because a simple Google search would not yield hundreds of images people have taken using their smart-phones.
I stopped being interested in trying to take memorable and artistic pictures for very similar reasons and find the sparse collection of black and white images from my parents' childhood and youth way for valuable to spend time looking over than the endless stream of images on my phone.
Comments