Today we will discuss the change in attitudes towards photography with the advent of smartphones and the development of social networks.
Once a year, I deal with my cloud storage in Dropbox, see which files take up a lot of space, which ones can be deleted with impunity, and which ones should be sorted and renamed. And so, I stumbled upon a draft of my old article prepared for the blog. The folder contained the text and about 40 photographs to it. The article, by the way, was about New York, I liked the city itself, and from time to time I recall with pleasure my trip there. But I never look at the photos from the trip.
And then, quite by accident, they caught my eye, and you look and look, you can't tear yourself away, in the end, the photos perfectly revive old memories, as if you were in the city again.
Having closed that folder, I just thought that on my own, and not by chance, I would hardly have gone into that old article or would have started revising photos from the trip. I have about four albums with photos from different countries, but at some point I realized that these photos are not for me, but for others, and it’s not a fact that these other people would be interested in how I was somewhere there went and where he was.
Therefore, starting this year, I stopped carrying a camera with me, and during the trip I take no more than ten photos on my smartphone, one or two of which go to Instagram.
Now, when the photo capabilities of smartphones are at a very good level, and the prevalence of social networks is maximum, any user can create their own gallery with many pictures.
But there is only one problem – few people are interested in watching these hundreds of photos. And now some of my friends have about 20 albums on their pages, and someone very rarely looks at them.
The situation in photography is the same as on the Internet in general some time ago. Previously, information, literature and new knowledge were not so accessible, so people appreciated them and eagerly grabbed the smallest crumbs. But with the spread of the Internet, information has become available to everyone, people are fed up with it, and now it is no longer of such value. We see the same thing in photography. Huge albums with hundreds of photos are no longer of interest to anyone, people prefer point impressions in the form of one picture with a comment. It seems to me that this is one of the reasons for the popularity of the same Instagram.
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Photo posted by Eldar Murtazin (@eldarmurtazin)
But with family photos, the situation is different. It seems to me that this is the area of photography where you don't get many pictures. After all, you will pass on this memory to your children and grandchildren, and they will definitely have time to look at this or that photo of your grandfather in his youth. What do you say, dear readers? How do you feel about a large number of photographs? Do you often take pictures with your smartphone?
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