I’ve become a big fan of digital photography, both still and moving. I was never a big picture taker—oh, I’ve got nothing against it and I’m certainly not one of those who annoyingly always try to hide whenever a camera comes out, but most of the times I just don’t think about taking pictures. I’ve tried to get better about that, and with digital possibilities, I’ve improved some.
Some.
I’d been aware of the power of digital for a while. I’ve used digital files generated by others in my publishing ventures for many years, but it wasn’t until I was editor at The Piggott Times and was required to take a bunch of pictures too that I actually had to use a digital camera. I definitely don’t think of myself as a photographer, but it came with the job so what’r'ya’gonna do? Using one, I think, is what changed my whole thinking about them.
One of the things I really like about digital is the ability to take tons of pictures searching for the “good” one without having the expense (and time issues) of all that film. I can’t tell you the amount of film we’ve saved since we went digital! But the downside is that we have a tendency to NOT delete all those pictures—y’know, even the bad ones. We pick out the ones we like, email them to family, stick them on Facebook, and then save all of them to disk. But why?
Maybe it is this ready availability of digital photography and ease of downloading it to the internet that has caused it so that we get to see all 100 of the bad peace signs and puckered lips (double bad when coupled together)…when just one would be enough. For instance, Brittany took 500 pictures at a recent Camp Electric during the summer. She would have put all 500 of them on there if I would have let her. Multiple images—some of them blurry—of the exact same musician on stage doing the exact same thing. As it is, she still ended up with about 60 and even then I thought some of them were just too similar.
But it’s the same thing sometimes when I’m looking at pictures online of friends and such, people who are not my daughter—there are just so many multiples of bad pictures. I guess the flipside is that at least we get to see SOME of the pictures. This is particularly important when it’s family. Of that we should be thankful.
But what’s the deal with all the pictures of food?
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