On pictures

Photography, once a noble art, has become, thanks to the move to digital, a mental illness - Nigel Farndale

I read an article in the Guardian about cellphone cameras and the recent obsession to document things. People used to keep diaries, now they take pictures.

Whenever you see something interesting, whether it is the Eiffel Tower or a funny duck, you take a picture. You upload everything on Facebook or Twitter or your personal blog. Everyone feels the need to share -- 'Hi look at me I'm in France, there's the Eiffel Tower behind me!'

Ok, I get the point of taking a few pics of places you've been, but as it said in the article, people sometimes forget to take time and enjoy the view, and spend two minutes taking a few pictures, and then turn away, because they have captured the scenery. Is taking a few pics everything you went to France for?

And it's totally fine that you upload pictures to places, and that you share your important holiday pictures and party pics et cetera, but I have some friends who just dump the entire content of their memory card on Facebook. I mean, everything. The blurry pictures, the unclear pictures, the accidental pictures of people's feet. Everything.

Ok digital age makes it easy to take pictures, but I think some people should really reconsider if they should at least choose the good ones out of the 200 a Facebook album can contain. Rather 10 clear and pretty pictures than 10 clear and 190 blurry ones.

People are so obsessed about sharing their happiness that the quality of the shared product drops. Photography is available for everyone, also to people whose only ability is to point and shoot. Should people be taught not to share everything? To edit their pictures? To choose good ones among their shots? 

On the other hand, the digital era also reaches the other end of the continuum: DSLRs are available, and an amateur photographer no longer needs a darkroom and expensive chemicals, papers etc. Sure, they are still expensive as hell, but it gives hope that not all digital material uploaded in the net is blurry cellphone pictures.

My mobile phone is from 2006, and it doesn't have a camera. It even has an antenna! What an ancient relic!

Oh, I wrote an entry about pictures without a single picture. Great.