It's A Snap!

Remember the 110 camera? Look it up if you have forgotten or you are too young to have seen one. That was the first camera that I bought. It was compact and easy to use, consisting of basically a point-and-shoot mechanism. It even had a telephoto option and a small sliding cover for the lens. If you forgot to open that and took a picture, the result may look as though you had used a filter. Come to think of it, I wonder if that was the intended use of it. The cartridge held 24 frames and could be loaded or unloaded with ease. I would just aim the thing in the general direction of the scene I wanted to capture, and if I liked what I saw through the viewfinder, I would click. 

There was no telling how the pictures would turn out. I had to wait for the film to be developed and prints made. Given that I was no expert photographer, if 3 or 4 pictures out of 10 looked alright, I would be happy. There were some surprisingly good ones too every now and then. I created albums by curating the best shots. After a few years, the prints faded or acquired this strange orange haze maybe because of the materials used in the album, exposure to UV light, and so on. 

After I graduated to a 35 mm camera, I was able to take better pictures (I think!) but the camera came with so many controls that befuddled me. Usually, I ended using the automatic option which meant that the camera decided most of the settings like exposure. The quality of printing meanwhile got better and at the same time less expensive as a result of stiff competition. 

And so, the collection of photographs grew steadily and in inverse proportion to that, the enthusiasm to curate them into albums. The photos simply ended up in envelopes and the envelopes in shoe boxes. The job just became harder and harder as the collection grew. Gone by the wayside was even the discipline of preserving the negatives in any sensible way. Now, I am not a prolific shooter by any measure. I can only imagine what someone who snaps away constantly must be facing. But then, such a person may be more motivated and disciplined. 

Sifting through the collection has become an exciting adventure because you sort of rediscover the moments that you had captured long ago. That nagging voice that says I must sort them out however, continues to be ignored. How about scanning them and making digital copies, you say? Ah, that would require a serious triage to select only those that are worthy of preserving. Plus a commitment to sit for hours scanning, editing, and saving, though ultimately I may have to do this to archive and preserve the pictures.   

Digital photography has certainly proved to be a boon. I don't have to spend money on film or processing. I can even feel good about not wasting resources in printing the bad pictures. Easy uploading to a computer means storage is not a problem.The smartphone has made taking pictures simpler by an order of magnitude. Everyone can now aspire to be a photographer. You don't have to buy a camera and you are always ready to shoot. 

It is estimated that there are nearly five billion smartphone users in the world. Just think about that for a moment. With such a staggering number of people walking around with these devices, and the cheap availability of storage, no moment is too insignificant to save. So we click away merrily. The photos often get uploaded to the cloud. They are shared on social media with friends and families and they keep getting shared to a wider and wider circle often without the original poster knowing. It is scary how these spread out with nary a thought given to privacy issues. Also, I just shudder to think about the enormous amount of cloud storage all the trivia must be taking up and the associated cost. Any savings on film, developing, and printing may be trivial compared to that. 

Don't get me wrong. I fully appreciate the ease of using the phone as a camera (a very good one at that) and the ability to take my 'collection' with me everywhere. It is literally available at my fingertips to browse. But the problem of curating the collection has predictably become much worse with digital photos. The task is simply too enormous. Consider this. In the old days, the wedding photographer usually came back with a printed album within a short time after the event. Today, a wedding may result in a few thousand pictures to sort through. Who has the time to make a hard copy album or even a digital one? If we cannot handle one event, we can forget about scouring through years of digital images. Until you are reminded that you are running out of storage, it is a problem that is easy to ignore. At that point, you simply buy more storage!

I think there is something to be said for a hard copy album of photographs. Sitting down on the couch and thumbing through the pictures is pleasant nostalgic journey. If you wanted to show them to others, it is so much more practical to hand over the printed album or even just the prints than handing over your phone. Call me old-fashioned but scrolling through the pictures on your phone is not quite the same thing. With digital photography, capturing the moments is a breeze but recalling them, not so easy. And having thousands of pictures as opposed to a few hundreds seems to have devalued the pictures somehow (is a picture still worth a thousand words?).

One final point. No matter how good the camera, the way the lens captures certain scenes cannot compare to the way our eyes do. I find that I have to put away the phone sometimes and just enjoy the scene in front of me. There is something in the way we are able to look near and afar simultaneously. As a result, what is simply breathtaking to our eyes can end up looking ordinary on the screen. Sometimes, you have to stop and smell the rose or in this case, stop and enjoy the scene. Or to borrow a phrase, we have to 'stand and stare'.